A Midwife's Tale
by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Summary
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich builds A Midwife's Tale around a single source, the diary Martha Ballard, a midwife and healer in Hallowell, Maine, kept for twenty seven years, from 1785 until close to her death in 1812. More than 1,400 pages of daily entries record a working life earlier historians had largely dismissed as too repetitive to use: Ballard delivered 816 babies and attended more than a thousand births across those years, alongside treating illness, preparing remedies, and running a household economy her neighbors depended on as much as her medical skill.
Ulrich spent years working through the diary before finding the method the book needed, later saying that once she could connect Martha's work to her world, she could begin to build stories out of entries other readers had found flatly repetitive. Each chapter takes up one diary entry and one theme of eighteenth century women's working lives, drawing on episodes including Ballard's role in identifying a father in a paternity dispute and her testimony in the rape case a neighbor brought against a local judge to show women's medical and legal knowledge operating largely outside any institution that otherwise recorded it.
Reading the book means following a patient, close reading of a genuinely difficult, terse source, letting Ballard's own words carry much of the narrative rather than treating the diary as background evidence for a story told in Ulrich's voice alone. It suits a reader interested in how ordinary women's labor, medical knowledge included, actually organized daily life in early America, rather than a conventional biography built from letters and public records.
Historical Context & Significance
A Midwife's Tale won an unusually full set of prizes in 1991: the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, the John H. Dunning Prize, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early Republic Book Prize, the William Henry Welch Medal, and the New England Historical Association Award. That year's Pulitzer finalists were Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal, Hugh Davis Graham's The Civil Rights Era, and Kenneth M. Stampp's America in 1857.
Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1990, the book reached a wider audience through a 1997 PBS American Experience documentary directed by Richard P. Rogers and produced by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, with Ulrich serving as consultant and narrator and the actress Kaiulani Lee playing Ballard. The book remains a widely assigned model for building history from a single ordinary person's own record rather than from the papers of the prominent.