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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
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812
Audiobook15 hours

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

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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About this audiobook

Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier.

Between 1785 and 1812, a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in twenty-seven years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife's Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 14, 2017
ISBN9781515983927
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

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Reviews for A Midwife's Tale

Rating: 4.124149865986395 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is very interesting way to learn about everyday life in America in the late 1700's-early 1800s. The extracted diary entries themselves are not that interesting; it is Ulrich's extrapolation of events in Martha's life that makes it so. She ties in information from other entries not presented, writings from other contemporaries (usually men), and historical documents to make a cohesive subject. Each chapter seems to develop a specific theme, e.g. medical practice, crime & punishment, marital customs, gardening, local economy and women's contributions, the rebellion of squatters trying to settle land owned by a major corporation. It countered my current assumptions that "women weren't educated" or "women with children out of wedlock were shunned".While I didn't read all the diary extracts, looking at Martha's spelling was quite interesting and made me wonder that maybe the current theory of encouraging young students to write without regard to spelling might be an excellent way to get them to express themselves.I hope that Ulrich left a transcript of the diary with the Maine Historical Society for future researchers use.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Diary of a midwife in Hallowell, Maine; daily entries give insight into the life of the community, particularly the women’s economic network that is missing from histories; explicated by Ulrich. The diary itself is fascinating, not because what Martha Ballard was doing was extraordinary, but because it wasn't--for rural Maine in 1800. And then there are Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's careful and thorough notes about how Martha's words fit in with what else we know about the society. One of the things I remember most from when I read it is the existence of a whole sub-economy that operated among the women--which was evidently completely invisible to the men's notions of the economic system--or at least to history, until now.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    nonfiction/women's economic & social history (1780s-1810s in Maine).
    These pulitzer winners are always so meticulously researched; here is a woman's life (the grandmother of Clara Barton) as reconstructed through primary sources. Not all the chapters are going to be interesting to all readers, but a lot of it was for me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An interesting book dealing with the life of a woman in the late 1700s, and early 1800s. It adds a great deal of context to history.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Sometimes I need more than 5 stars to review a book, this is one. Fascinating book revealing life on the edge at the beginning of white America. Every day every action, every death, every birth, every sickness, all for the good Lord willing it or allowing it. What a hard life they lived. Every step they took was basically fraught with peril - having a baby could easily mean death, crossing thru the woods to your neighbors house could result in a fall and death...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An intimate look at the life of a 18th-century midwife, healer, housewife, and mother in rural Maine. Drawing on the seemingly bare diary entries of Martha Ballard, Ulrich paints an honest and vivid picture of the work of women throughout a period in history when they were considered unremarkable and their influence was often overlooked.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent use of a rare diary of a woman, a self-described "gadder" — a woman who leaves home frequently to interact with neighbors — and a woman whose medical work impinged on the very separate world of men. The writing is fluid and fascinating, neither pedantic nor glib; Ms. Ulrich offers questions where questions are all we can have and suggests possibilities where she has support from within Ballard's diary or from other sources. Her footnotes are great, and support rather than interfere with the text if you're a reader who prefers to read the entire chapter/ book and then look at attributions, explanations, etc. I really enjoyed this book, and learned a lot from it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Generally pretty interesting information about a woman's life in the late 1700s-early 1800s based on her diary. My only criticism is that I think the author sometimes treated her interpretations of what was going on as facts. Nevertheless, it's amazing to see how demanding life was for Martha Ballard as a midwife in Maine, and it was also fascinating to learn more about the flow of the community -- so much has changed in the time since. There was much more visiting back and forth than I would have imagined. Also, notions that premarital sex was rare to nonexistent are wrong, but also our image that only women were punished for out of wedlock births. In fact, the community encouraged the women to name the fathers and then demanded that the fathers marry the women and be responsible for the children. Finally, very familiar familial conflicts were normal then as well as now -- children not living up to their parents' expectations, jealously or bickering between people, and even mass murder (a father killed his family and then himself).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an amazing book that I highly recommend. It's non-fiction based on a diary written by a midwife living in Maine at the end of the 18th century. Thatcher starts each chapter with 2-4 weeks of diary entries. These are generally 1-4 sentences describing the weather, how she felt, what she did (spun wool, planted beans, etc.), and if she delivered any babies she'd account for how she got there, how the mother and child did, and when she got paid. It is 27 years of a daily account of her life which can sound rather mundane, but Thatcher pulls an amazing amount of information out of this diary. She covers everything: midwife practices, the shift from midwives to doctors, a history of the settlement of Maine, a local murder, a local rape and the court proceedings that followed, debtors prisons, family relations, and the role of women in the local economy. As a midwife, Martha Ballard presided over more than 800 deliveries, only losing one mother. While Thatcher explores all of these topics through Martha's words, she never loses Martha's voice. This is so worth reading!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was marvelous. It was based on the midwife's diary but took parts of it and used it as background for a sociological and historical study of her life and times. I found it fascinating. It has inspired me to keep a regular diary again, (though I am no midwife) but was touched by the story her terse but reliable entries told.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was fascinated by the personal history of this woman. It gave me great insight into post-Revolutionary War New England life. I was shocked at the percent of pre-marital pregnancies (38%)!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is rather complicated. With excerpts from Martha's diary, we are treated to a peek at life in Hallowell Maine from 1785-1812. Part of what fascinated me was the use of herbal remedies, and other resources close to hand.In years past I have done a bit of study into these things myself, and was intrigued by how and what herbs were used by this woman who was midwife and doctor, nurse and friend to the women in her community. He usual fee was 6 pence, but she was often paid in goods or service and often according to the means of the family she visited. One family might pay nothing, and Martha would forgive the debt, just to see the woman brought to bed with her child safely and in good health for both. Another family would take pride in paying her very handsomely with goods and money far beyond what she requested.Martha made her way to these families in the best and the worst of circumstances. A winters night might find her plowing through waist high snow on foot. Another early morning might find her ensconced in a carriage and carried by this means to her door. This, as you can imagine was a rare event. Far more often is was on foot or horseback.It was common in those days for women to give birth every two years. This ensured that the family would have help needed to maintain their independence, as each child soon learned tasks that helped to provide the family with support of one kind or another. What tasks learned depended mostly upon the gender of the child, and the business of the family.The research done by Ulrich provides us with a much broader view than we would have been given by Martha's diary alone. Comparisons are made to other towns, other locations regarding births, deaths and family occupation. IT is explained in simple terms how one family's reliance on other family's foruse of needed tools or trade was key to their survival. One family might weave and trade the cloth for wool. It seems to me that if we had to rely on others more these days we might try a little harder to be nicer to each other.This is not to say that Martha's time was without local conflicts. For instance it was not uncommon for the head of the house to be jailed for debts. This would put his family into a very difficult and embarrassing situation.Something else that interested me and also reminded me of another book was the relationship between the midwife and the male Doctor. In the beginning things were a lot simpler and there was a great deal of cooperation between doctor and midwife. As time passed, the doctors began to feel and act in a superior manner. Eventually midwives found themselves in a much inferior position to the doctor. These things are mentioned by the author more so than by Martha. Her account is more mundane, and lends itself to the simple daily activities of the families. She kept her house, raised her family and kept local birth and death records, as well as some rather gossipy accounts of who was getting up to no good around the town.Without Martha's careful accounting there would be little record of the families of that time. There would have been no history for her own family of the triumphs and turmoils and moves and local history involving their ancestors.This is undoubtedly a book of history, and should be considered so by any thinking of reading it. There are plenty of dates and dry patches, but it was interesting to me none the less.If the topic of midwifery interests you, you might want to give it a read.. or if the history of Maine is what draws you in, this might be a book for you. I confess that it was much more of a history book then I expected, but I was determined to carry on . I am glad I did, but this one will not make it to my reread shelf.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of my favorite books, probably for its complexity in addition to the general topic. If you are looking for a romanticized book about life at the time of the Revolutionary War, look elsewhere. What caught me about this book was the painstaking research that went into it - and the fruits of that research are tremendous. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich dissects Martha Ballard's diary and compares it to other sources from the period giving a picture of life at the time. Some of the most interesting aspects, to me, were the lives of the women (which is usually not well documented, historically), the beginning use of physicians for childbirth and the incredible connection between the people, the environment and the society of the time. A great book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of the most important works in both women's history and Maine history for the post-Revolutionary period.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Terrific social history work which examines the life of a typical American woman in the early Federal period through her diary. Wonderfully written and illuminating this is a must-read for anyone interested in American history beyond the typical "great men" stories.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ulrich writes an amazingly detailed history of one small region in Maine during the late 18th and early 19th century. She bases the book around the diary of a mid-wife named Martha Ballard. The diary itself is remarkably terse, but Ulrich makes use of a variety of sources to supplement the diary and provide context. The amount of detail she provides makes the book slow to read, but gives an excellent picture of early American society in this rural society in Maine.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This pathbreaking, Pulitzer-prize-winning book is a study of the life, labor, and social connections of a rural midwife, Martha Ballard, based on her manuscript diary in the Maine State Library. A MIDWIFE'S TALE changed the way historians researched and wrote women's history. In the 1970s and '80s, students of women's history primary focused on the records of literate, middle- and upper-class women, and defined their lives as a struggle against the strictures of a patriarchal society. Ulrich, by contrast, chose to study the life of a modestly-educated woman of limited means, and to describe her daily business rather than her conflicts with others. She found that women like Ballard enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy, even power, in early American society: they sold homespun, garden crops, and dairy goods to neighbors; commanded the labor of their daughters and of boarding teenagers from neighboring households; and, in the case of midwives, presided over the rituals of birth and life. (Martha Ballard fulfilled these latter tasks quite well, losing only 19 babies from the 814 births she attended, and providing medical care to dozens of her neighbors). Ulrich's book reminds us that in history, "the petty struggles and small graces of ordinary life" (p. 343) were as important as longer-term struggles for legal equality and citizenship. A note for readers: while the early chapters of Ulrich's book can be slow going, the latter half of the book includes many exciting episodes, including a mass murder and a violent rural insurgency.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A study of the life of an eighteenth-century midwife, Martha Ballard, in Hallowell, Maine, on the Kenebec River, based on her diary.Laurel Thatcher Ulrich studied the diaries of one of her ancestors, a talented, dedicated, tireless midwife in Maine, who lived during the late 1700s. Ulrich weaves excepts from the diaries with her own interpretations of the historical situation, based on extensive research. Wonderful book! The best sort of women's history.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a historian's historian, and a gifted writer. Not only has she brought to light a marvellous document of life in America's past, she has also used her considerable scholarship to add depth and clarity to what would otherwise be an obscure journal of an unknown woman. Reading it, you are so caught up in the lucid way in which she highlights the details of Martha's story that it is easy to miss the incredible amount of research, study, and analysis that made it all possible. An impressive and important accomplishment, and a wonderfully readable book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Martha Ballard's diary gives a unique insight into the life of women, and in particular, the life of a woman who helps to bring new babies into the world. This book doesn't read like a novel, these are her diary entries with additional descriptive text to help you follow along. I found it fascinating.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This isn't a book with an exciting or compelling storyline. It took some dedication to read it, but it was fascinating. I've never had the discipline to keep a journal but I appreciate the consistency of Martha Ballard's diary ... as well as the discipline it took to decipher it and place it in the larger context of her community.