A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812

A fascinating example of social history, this book finds its foundation in an early American midwife’s simple daily diary of activities and transactions. Using a wide range of other original sources, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich brilliantly expands the picture of Martha Ballard and her times. At first glance Ballard’s simple, unemotional daily entries don’t seem like interesting source material, but enriched by Ulrich’s extensive research, they form a valuable window into early American society.

Ulrich keeps her research process pretty transparent, always describing which documents shed light where. This makes for somewhat slow reading, but it’s worth the trade-off in being able to see and appreciate how she knows what she knows. Though I only had attention for about half the chapters, I was glad to have been invited into the research process.

All chapters begin with passages from the diary, “fleshing out this midwife's bare entries with interpretive essays” on a particular aspect of early American society (Publisher’s Weekly). Topics include medical knowledge and practice, the roles of men and women in the community economy, the evolving relationship between midwives and doctors, and marriage and family life. Throughout, I appreciated the new vision of empowered women Ulrich’s portrait gives. We often think of women from earlier times being downtrodden and without opportunity, but Martha and the women around her together formed a female economy as vital to the survival of their community as the men’s contributions.

In the middle of these big issues, I came to know an ordinary woman who intelligently, sensibly, compassionately improved her small world. As midwife and herbalist, Martha Ballard touched every household in her community, often at their most vulnerable times. As one Amazon reviewer writes,

[Ulrich reveals] the complex routine of a woman who kept a household for seven people, ran a cottage textile workshop, and served as midwife at the birth 816 infants during her 27 years of practice. . . . Ballard's ministrations, in fact, went far beyond birthing to the practice of general medicine. She could apply poultices, lance abscesses, expel worms, induce vomiting, stop hemorrhages, bring down a fever, and—all else failing—gently close the eyes of the dead. In this way, writes Ulrich, the midwife "mediated the mysteries of birth, procreation, illness, and death.”

I’m glad Ulrich helped me know her.