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

“Reading such a story, we can easily imagine Martha as an archetypical pioneer. Indeed, the rhythms of her story echo the seventeenth-century captivity narratives that gave New England its first frontier heroines.”

The idea of the frontier and pioneering appears again, matching with the imagery of the “fickle” river. Ulrich’s call back to literature from the century before Martha’s life also roots her story with a sense of historicity. Though fictional tales likely exaggerated elements of frontier life, Martha’s diary paints them with strokes of realism.

“Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.”

The power of Martha’s diary is in its repetitive nature. Ulrich can establish a microhistorical study using the diary due to its daily entries, as it can accurately stand as an honest depiction of the minutiae of Martha’s life and allows historians to trace even gradual changes over months, years, and decades. The “exhaustive, repetitive” nature of it also foreshadows the often-tedious rhythms of balancing domestic labor, textile production, and midwifery that Martha depicted.

“On good days the saw kept a steady rhythm, the vertical blade moving up and down 120 times a minute, striking a rapid trochee (‘Faaa-sher, Faaa-sher’) that echoed through the trees as log after log inched along the wooden track.”

These lines demonstrate Ulrich’s familiarity with the disciplines of writing and literature. The reference to a “trochee,” a poetic syllabic term, shows her multifaceted educational background.

“Both the difficulty and the value of the diary lie in its astonishing steadiness.”

Here, Ulrich reestablishes the “steadiness” and “dailiness” of Martha’s diary, but she complicates the idea with the mention of difficulty. The diary is difficult, as it requires close attention to the myriad details Martha included about her life and her community to sort out all the different subplots taking place on the page.

“Martha’s diary fills in the missing work—and trade—of women.”

The view of women’s work, especially as it pertains to the economy, is an important thematic element of Martha’s diary and Ulrich’s analysis. Women’s work took place in the home, making it invisible in public records and much of written history, but Martha’s careful recordkeeping in her diary brings it to light.

“Martha’s diary reaches to the marrow of eighteenth-century life. The trivia that so annoyed earlier readers provide a consistent, daily record of the operation of a female-managed economy.”

Martha’s role as a recordkeeper appears again. Ulrich notes that its value grows as time progresses: Those who first read the diary were closer to Martha’s time, and its contents were perhaps less enlightening and more “irritating,” especially before the modern era, which places more emphasis on women’s history. To modern readers and historians, however, her words illuminate how the women-driven economy of Kennebec functioned and flourished through collaboration.

“In twentieth-century terms, she was simultaneously a midwife, nurse, physician, mortician, pharmacist, and attentive wife. Furthermore, in the very act of recording her work, she became a keeper of vital records, a chronicler of the medical history of her town.”

Ulrich casts Martha as a historian, in addition to her numerous medical roles. This adds another level of importance to Martha’s diary as a piece of historical archival evidence about 18th-century New England.

“Her diary tames the stereotypes and at the same time helps us to imagine the realities on which they were based.”

The stereotypes Ulrich alludes to are those contained in literature that describe midwives as gossipy. Martha herself is careful not to gossip, but still offers friendship to the woman she cared for, a bond that men from the outside could construe as “gossipy,” especially when women—such as Rebecca Foster—disclosed abuse.

“Hallowell’s female healers move in and out of sickrooms unannounced, as though their presence there were the most ordinary thing in the world—as it was.”

This sentence emphasizes on “as it was” with the em dash, which contrasts with the hypothetical “as though their presence there […] were ordinary.” The female healers of Hallowell, arguably led by Martha, were everywhere that the ill were, demonstrating the prevalence and consistency of their role in the emerging healthcare system.

“Thanks to Martha’s diary, it is also a reminder of the frailty of human life and the forgotten ministrations of Kennebec women.”

The frailty of human life appears throughout Martha’s diary, due to her proximity to death. As a healer and midwife, she saw life and death firsthand, tending to those at the starts and ends of their lives, which demonstrates the broad role the midwife held in the community.

“Clearly, some activities in an eighteenth-century town brought men and women together. Others defined their separateness.”

The separate nature of men and women appears throughout Ulrich’s analysis, in the cultural, social, and economic realms. Men and women worked together within the home and their family units, but outside the home, they were almost entirely separate.

“Day by day women negotiated the fragile threads of ordinary need that bound families together.”

This sentence describes the difference between the public actions of men and the private actions of women. Men held ceremonial roles; they rang the church bells and supervised the burials of the dead. However, women handled the practical matters of dressing and caring for the bodies, a tradition that kept together the normality of life. The use of the term “thread” also ties back to the metaphor of the social web that Ulrich constructs.

“The courting patterns and matrimonial customs of eighteenth-century Hallowell wove couples into the larger community, reinforcing gender roles, celebrating group identity, and, though it may not be so obvious, maintaining the boundaries within which sexuality might be expressed.”

The courting patterns described include young people being allowed to choose their spouses and also the prevalence of premarital sex. Even within the somewhat taboo nature of premarital sex, there were still matrimonial customs that required marriage or support from the father to the mother if pregnancy occurred.

“There is no center, only a kind of grid, faint trails of experience converging and deflecting across a single day.”

In poetic language, Ulrich describes the structure of Martha’s entries. The author finds the sheer number of details and subplots converging into the center of each entry astounding and difficult to track.

“‘The women’ are the most obvious piece of equipment in the diary.”

Of all the tools Martha had in her metaphorical tool bag, the most important were the neighbor women who were summoned to offer assistance and comfort to laboring mothers. In this way, like the textile industry, midwifery was a communal activity.

“The intimidation of Ephraim was part of a larger struggle to save their own land from ‘the avaricious appetite of men who are striveing to be independent Lords in a glorious Republic.’”

Ulrich explains the historical challenges of land surveying in the description of Ephraim’s attack when he was robbed at musket-point. Outside of Martha’s domestic and midwifery spheres, the world had other issues, namely tensions caused by the expansion of the United States northward and westward. This mention offers historical background missing from Martha’s diary entry about the attack.

“At such moments there must have been a comforting congruence between Ephraim’s troubles and Martha’s, a shared sense that the world had indeed slipped from its familiar orbit, that the axis of the universe was changing.”

Martha struggled to keep up with the uptick in her midwifery practice and the lack of adult daughters to help with domestic work. At the same time, Ephraim was attacked while performing his job. This is a moment of tension that brought them together as a couple, unlike the later conflict that will drive them apart.

“For Martha, the human body had a recognizable geography. She could identify John Davis’s lungs, intestines, kidneys, bladder, and gall bladder, noting they were all inflamed.”

The use of the term “geography” connects Martha’s knowledge of the human body to the knowledge of the land, paralleling again her career and Ephraim’s. It also further illuminates her knowledge of the human body and medicine.

“In reality, it put as much pressure on a man’s connections as on the man himself. A form of coercion rather than punishment, it was a way of forcing a man to reveal hidden property or liquidate capital—social as well as financial.”

This description of the debtor’s jail system explains how the debtor was encouraged to pay back his debt. Like Moses and Jonathan, sometimes the acquaintances or families and friends of the debtor would pay off his debt for him. In the case of Ephraim, he did not have enough financial or social capital to obtain the $800 he owed.

“I Could wish it might have been the lot of all my Children to have heard him, but God is able to teach the heart. I pray he might.”

This allusion to God is an example of Martha’s prayers on the page of her diary. It also alludes to her ongoing conflict with her son, as she prayed God would “teach the heart” of some of her children, likely Jonathan.

“The first half of Martha’s diary, written when her family’s productive power was at its height, portrays a self-confident and vigorous woman managing a household, acting autonomously, and trading with her neighbors. The second half shows how illness, fatigue, and an unlucky move could shatter such a world, expose a woman’s dependence, and force her to lean on the uncertain arm of family affection.”

This paragraph explains the difference between the halves of Martha’s diary, demonstrating the slow decline of the Ballard family’s collective fortunes, and Martha’s fortunes especially. It alludes as well to Martha’s dependence on Jonathan being uncomfortable, as the family affection is “uncertain.” 

“For Martha the minister’s text bore a deep resonance. As a midwife, she understood both the coming forth and the returning.”

The “coming forth and returning” is a reference to life and death, again cementing Martha as a presence at the beginning and end of life. It also shows how her worldview is informed by her faith and the messages of her religion.

“Yet beneath the recurring cycles of the seasons, each year the same seeds, the same words, the same shifts in weather, old lives were passing away and new lives beginning.”

As Martha was in the twilight of her life, the town around her had changed. In connecting the seasons to the changes in the town, Ulrich demonstrates the connection between Martha’s work and the natural world.