A Midwife's Tale is pretty interesting

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 is a slow starter but ultimately a worthwhile read. The book is an exegesis of a rare document of life in late 18th century Maine. Martha Ballard lived most of her life in Hollowell, a settler town on the Kennebec River. She was both a remarkable and a typical woman of her time; remarkable in that she could read and write - and chose to keep a record of her life and profession, and typical in that she adhered to the religious atmosphere of her time and place, that she put forth immense physical effort to provide subsistence for herself and her family, that she bore nine children and lost three of them as infants, and in that she knew and kept her place as a woman in a puritanical society. Martha was also a highly skilled and successful midwife, and it is the record of her midwifery in a community which required "a heroic commitment to childbearing" that makes up much of the diary's contents. It is possible that Martha decided to keep this written record as a way of managing her accounts. Midwifery was one of the few careers open to women in her time and it happened to pay relatively well.

In the twenty-seven years that Martha kept her diary, she recorded her attendance at 998 deliveries. Not once did a woman in her care die in childbirth and only 5 women died later of complications from deliveries Martha herself performed. In one of these cases, though she could not have known it, Martha almost certainly transmitted scarlet fever which caused puerperal fever to the laboring mother. Scarlet fever ran rampant through Hollowell on a regular basis, killing both children and adults. By any contemporary standard, women were in extraordinarily good hands with Martha as their midwife. Martha was also a healer, though she probably would not have assumed such a title herself. She administered remedies and certainly cultivated herbs for their medicinal properties and uses.

Martha's diary entries are extremely terse and often repetitive, so much so that previous scholars have found very little of interest in the diary. Ulrich however has parsed the text minutely and managed to put flesh on her subject. Martha's very reticence to record neighborhood gossip, family rows with her adult children or even the anatomical details of labor and delivery make such minute examination necessary.

Ulrich begins several chapters with transcriptions of Martha's entries over several weeks to a month. The diary provides a fascinating portrait of the social (rather than biological) aspects of labor and childbirth in a settler community. Ulrich also devotes several later chapters to discussion of different aspects of Martha's life and the cultural setting of the times. This is where it started to get interesting for me. Ulrich outlines the distinct male and female economies in late 18th century America, showing how the division of labor along gender lines created separate markets for both goods and labor. The author teases out facts on sexual habits by looking at the average interval between marriage and birth of the first child, which in Hollowell happened to be about 5 months. We also get a view of how the increasingly organized, male-dominated medical profession began to interact with "women's medicine," including Martha's midwifery and "simples" healing. A Midwife's Tale also provides a good picture of how women of that time and place passed their days in a ceaseless round of seasonal work. Though Martha and her immediate family were "middle class" within the settler community, in the course of her work she attended women from all economic classes. Ulrich assiduously mines Martha's brief daily entries to shed light on both the poor and the well to do households in Hollowell. The diary also mentions two sensational crimes that took place in the town - a rape and a mass murder. Ulrich uses these events to briefly examine the trial process of the era as well as the social reaction to these events. Martha herself was called as a witness in the rape trial.

I liked that Ulrich chose to preserve the unorthodox spelling and grammar of the diary. Martha's education provided her with basic writing skills, but this did not translate to consistency in punctuation, spelling or grammar. She frequently altered the way she wrote various words, even the names of people in her own family. Despite my hidebound attitudes to grammar and spelling, I felt that Martha's original writing significantly added to my appreciation of her world.

Several maps are included in her book, helping the reader understand the distances Martha traveled on her house calls to women in labor. An appendix lists all of the medicinal ingredients mentioned in Martha's diary, along with the dated diary entry describing the use to which she put each one. There is also an extensive section of notes to provide both sources for information in the text as well as additional commentary.

I found this book very slow going for the first few chapters, but I'm glad I stuck with it. Ulrich seems to flounder about somewhat before hitting her stride in this tale. Her tone throughout is clear and attentive. I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in early American history, the history of midwifery or women's studies. Anyone with a high school education and some interest would find it easy to get through this book, once past the first chapter or two.


To those interested in early American history, I would also highly recommend:
• John Adams - McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of our unsung second president
• Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams - Lynne Withey's examination of a very hands-on First Lady
• Understanding Thomas Jefferson - E.M. Halliday's unveiling of our most enigmatic president
• Patriarch - Richard Norton Smith's excellent volume on George Washington's presidency
• The First American: Benjamin Franklin - a superlative biography on America's premier elder statesman
• Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero - for those interested in reading just a bit further afield