Abstract :
Twenty years after its initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize
winning monograph A midwife’s tale : the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812
(1990) still serves as a major benchmark in women’s labour/economic history mainly because it provides
scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not
through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself. While, on the surface,
Ballard’s encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich
notes, ‘ it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha
Ballard’s book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing’ (p. 9). By piecing together ‘ ordinary ’
primary source material to form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how
American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public
spheres. A midwife’s tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important :
by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and
positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our
understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783–1848 ). Even though A
midwife’s tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of-the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine),
it deserves the renewed attention of historians – especially those interested in gender relations and wageearning,
the economic value of domestic labour, and women’s work before industrialization.
