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The cover of A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

What can one midwife's daily diary reveal about how ordinary people lived, worked and healed in early America?

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At a glance

Author
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Why read it

  • You will see how plain daily records can reveal the life of a whole community
  • You will learn how much skilled work a midwife did, from delivering babies to making remedies from local plants
  • You will understand how seasons, river and ice ruled daily life in a small town

Who it is for

  • A small town museum volunteer sorting old local records
  • A nurse or doctor curious about care before modern medicine
  • A family historian wondering what to do with old diaries

The idea people argue about

Ulrich's boldest claim is methodological: a terse diary of ordinary work can revise political and social history when read against other records. A common objection is that Martha Ballard was one woman in one Maine community, and that a historian can make sparse entries say more than their writer intended. Ulrich answers by separating the diary's words from her reconstruction and testing names, dates, journeys, debts, births, court events, and households against public documents. She also makes silence part of the evidence problem rather than filling every gap with certainty. The method reveals networks of women's labor and exchange that official records often fragment or omit. It cannot make Ballard statistically representative of all women, but it demonstrates that an apparently private record can expose institutions and relationships that a history built only from formal male offices would miss.

Three common misunderstandings

  1. Ballard's work was not limited to attending births or waiting for neighbors to summon her. The diary records medical visits, nursing, textile production, gardening, household management, travel, exchanges, and community obligations alongside more than eight hundred deliveries.
  2. The diary is not a continuous intimate confession of private feelings and personal motives. Its entries are often compressed records of weather, work, movement, illness, payment, and neighborhood events, requiring context rather than assumptions about unrecorded emotion.
  3. Ulrich does not treat every archival silence as proof of oppression or every diary entry as transparent fact. She compares sources, marks uncertainty, and distinguishes Ballard's wording from historical inference when reconstructing events such as the rape trial and family conflict.

Contents

  1. Maps and Illustrations
  2. Tables and Graphs
  3. INTRODUCTION
  4. “a great sea A going”
  5. CHAPTER ONE AUGUST 1787 “Exceeding Dangerously ill”
  6. CHAPTER TWO SEPTEMBER 1788 “warpt a piece”
  7. CHAPTER THREE OCTOBER 1789 “Mrs Foster has sworn a Rape on a number of men”
  8. CHAPTER FOUR NOVEMBER 1792 “Matrimonial writes”
  9. CHAPTER FIVE DECEMBER 1793 “Birth 50. Birth 51”
  10. CHAPTER SIX JANUARY 1796 “find my house up in arms”
  11. CHAPTER SEVEN FEBRUARY 1801 “A Desection Performd”
  12. CHAPTER EIGHT MARCH 1804 “what a scean had I to go at Evening”
  13. CHAPTER NINE APRIL 1806 “Polly Purington here”
  14. CHAPTER TEN MAY 1809 “Workt in my gardin”
  15. EPILOGUE
  16. Appendix: Medicinal Ingredients Mentioned in Martha Ballard’s Diary
  17. I. LOCAL PLANTS
  18. II. PURCHASED MEDICINES
  19. III. MISCELLANEOUS INGREDIENTS

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