A Midwife's Tale Quotes

“Everything in arms. Did not find time to sit down till 2 pm.” The phrase is idiomatic, of course, yet it suggests an attitude. A house could be an adversary. Turn your back, and it rippled into disorder. Chairs tipped. Candles slumped. Egg yolks hardened in cold skillets. Dust settled like snow. Only by constant effort could a woman conquer her possessions. Mustering grease and ashes, shaking feather beds and pillows to attention, scrubbing floors and linens into subjection, she restored a fragile order to a fallen world.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Women, to use a Biblical metaphor, performed their works under a bushel; men’s candles burned on the hill.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“That Martha Ballard kept her diary is one small miracle; that her descendants saved it is another. When her great-great-granddaughter Mary Hobart inherited it in 1884, it was “a hopeless pile of loose unconsecutive pages”—but it was all there. The diary had remained in Augusta for more than sixty years, probably in the family of Dolly Lambard, who seems to have assumed custody of her mother’s papers along with the rented cow.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Nonetheless, something new was happening in her relationship with the doctor and she did not quite understand it. The arguments with Cony were a consequence of tensions inherent in the system of social medicine. Yet they may also have stemmed partly from subtle shifts in the attitudes of local physicians. As new medical ideas infiltrated the region, even conservative doctors like Daniel Cony became acutely conscious of their authority.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“What the incident shows is the power of her presence in the community. Cony was threatened by her intervention, presumed or real. It also shows the doctor’s willingness to assert his authority against the claims of a presumably inferior practitioner. This was, of course, what the new medical societies were encouraging physicians to do.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“She had defined herself as a “gadder,” as a woman who left home, frequently, to care for her neighbors.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Yet the subtle shift that led Martha at the end of the week to describe Otis Pierce’s sister Hitty as “Mrs Pierce” is intriguing. Martha usually reserved “Mrs” for married women or for mature daughters of prominent men. 8 No other single mother had been given this honorific. Hitty’s alliance with John Vassall Davis had given her a peculiar eminence.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“while the appearance of a doctor at a delivery becomes more noteworthy when the hundreds of other deliveries in which no one thought to call a physician are considered. In midwifery as in so many other aspects of Martha Ballard’s diary, it is the combination of boredom and heroism, of the usual and the unusual, that tells the story.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Martha’s diary supports the notion that children chose their own spouses; there is no evidence of parental negotiation, and little hint of parental supervision in any of the courtships she describes. The diary also confirms the prevalence of premarital sex. Yet there is little evidence of romance and much to suggest that economic concerns remained central. The weddings in the Ballard family were distinctly unglamorous affairs, almost nonevents. For the women, they were surrounded by an intense productivity, a gathering of resources that defined their meaning and purpose.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“A trial for rape, then, was really a contest between the men involved—the husband or father, the accused, the judges, and jury—rather than a judgment of the events themselves. This was, of course, exactly the position taken by Henry Sewall in his letter to George Thatcher. He was far more concerned with the conflict between Joseph North and Obadiah Wood than with what happened between Rebecca Foster and the men she accused. This is surprising, given Sewall’s general concern with moral behavior, yet he was already prejudiced against the Fosters, while his experience as clerk of the U.S. District Court gave him plenty of opportunity to associate with lawyers and to adopt their point of view. His letter, like the play, is essentially comic, a satirical dismissal of rural pettiness masquerading as law. 23”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Martha Ballard rarely used punctuation. Like most eighteenth-century diarists, she capitalized randomly, abbreviated freely, and spelled even proper names as the spirit moved, sometimes giving more than one spelling of a name, including those of her own family, in a single entry.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“The structure of the diary forces us to consider midwifery in the broadest possible context, as one specialty in a larger neighborhood economy, as the most visible feature of a comprehensive and little-known system of early health care, as a mechanism of social control, a strategy for family support, and a deeply personal calling.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“To understand Martha’s world we must approach it on its own terms, neither as a golden age of household productivity nor as a political void from which a later feminist consciousness emerged. 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. The scandals excised by local historians provide insight into sexual behavior, marital and extramarital, in a time of tumult and change. The remarkable birth records, 814 deliveries in all, allow the first full accounting of delivery practices and of obstetrical mortality in any early American town. The family squabbles that earlier readers (and abridgers) of the diary found almost as embarrassing as the sexual references show how closely related Martha’s occupation was to the life cycle of her own family, and reveal the private politics behind public issues like imprisonment for debt. The somber record of her last years provides rare evidence on the nature of aging in the preindustrial world, and shows the pull of traditional values in an era of economic and social turmoil.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“The late eighteenth century was not only an era of political revolution but of medical, economic, and sexual transformation. 48 Not surprisingly, it was also a time when a new ideology of womanhood self-consciously connected domestic virtue to the survival of the state. 49”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Nancy Norcross suffered lingering labor in an era when old childbirth practices were being challenged in both England and America by a new “scientific” obstetrics promoted by male physicians.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“The problem is not that the diary is trivial but that it introduces more stories than can easily be recovered and absorbed.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Martha recorded debts contracted and “rewards” received, and some of the time she noted numbers of yards “got out” of the loom and varieties of beans put into the ground. Her midwifery accounts are even more methodical. She carefully labeled and numbered each delivery, adding an XX to the margin when the fee was paid.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“In eighteenth-century New England, farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, ship’s captains, and perhaps a very few housewives kept daybooks, running accounts of receipts and expenditures, sometimes combining economic entries with short notes on important family events and comments on work begun or completed. Other early diarists used the blank pages bound into printed almanacs to keep their own tally on the weather, adding brief entries on gardening, visits to and from neighbors, or public occurrences of both the institutional and the sensational sort. Martha Ballard did all these things.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Still, it took genuine commitment for a busy man to copy by hand hundreds of pages of an obscure diary, traveling to Boston to do so. Given the circumstances, Nash can certainly be forgiven for dropping generic references to weeding cucumbers or bleaching cloth. That he wished to preserve his own good name in the town by omitting scandal is also understandable.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Much of importance had indeed been omitted from the diary. As we have seen, Nash preserved about a third of the original. He recorded the dramatic journey across the Kennebec in 1789, the passage with which we began this book, most of Martha’s account of the Purrinton murders, and many of her casual references to public affairs. But he provided only an edited version of the births, salvaging genealogical but deliberately excising sexual content. He mentioned autopsies, but excluded her detailed descriptions of them, gave representative samples of her work entries, but cut or muted all references to family troubles. He omitted her description of the North rape trial”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“For 58 of her 77 years, she was known as “Mrs. Ballard.” Even Benjamin Tappin, the minister who “conversed sweetly” with her just before her death, was unsure of her name. Sometime after 1830, he took it upon himself to correct the early records of Augusta First Church. “It does not appear that any record was made of female members,” he wrote, “but there is sufficient evidence that several females were considered members of the Church. I have taken the liberty, therefore, to add their names.” Beside Ephraim’s name, he wrote “Dorothy Ballard.” 49 James North, Augusta’s nineteenth-century historian, referred to her as “Mrs. Ephraim Ballard” in the body of his work and as “Hannah” in his brief genealogy of the Ballard family. 50 Fortunately, she had the good sense to write firmly at the end of one of her homemade booklets, “Martha Ballard Her Diary.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Vaughan was convinced that the new therapies, heroic bloodletting and the use of digitalis, usually in combination with opium, were essential to patient care. To his dismay, he had found a man who preferred the quiet operations of established remedies—and prayer. In Benjamin Vaughan’s mind—and perhaps in Daniel Cony’s as well—the lines were clearly drawn. It was a case of prejudice versus science and of “female” versus “approved” therapies.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Eighteenth-century households were workshops. Mothers engaged in soapmaking, weaving, candle-dipping, slaughtering, and endless sewing relied on older children to care for their littlest siblings. 10”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“In May of 1788, Nathaniel Thwing convicted Joanna of slander after her lover’s father complained that when his son offered to take the child and have it brought up in his house, she had answered, “No, you shall not have it to carry there, for they, meaning your complainant & his wife will murder it, for they have murdered two or three already.” To say that paternity cases were often settled out of court does not mean that they were settled easily or pleasantly. It is merely to argue that the threat of a lawsuit was sometimes as effective as an actual prosecution.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“For thirteen of the twenty out-of-wedlock births in the diary, Martha recorded the name of the father, using stylized language that suggests she had indeed “taken testimony” as the law instructed.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“We know that courts gradually abandoned the practice of fining married couples whose first child was born too soon,”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“There were certainly inequities in the way male and female culpability was defined in this period, yet there is no evidence that in rural communities women who bore children out of wedlock were either ruined or abandoned as early novels would suggest.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“William Nelson has shown that while fornication prosecutions still accounted for more than a third of criminal actions in Massachusetts between 1760 and 1774, in only one case was the father of an illegitimate child prosecuted—a black man suspected of cohabiting with a white woman.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“The prosecutorial double standard originated in a 1668 Massachusetts law that introduced the English practice of asking unwed mothers to name the father of their child during delivery. At first glance, questioning a woman in labor seems a form of harassment. In practice, it was a formality allowing the woman, her relatives, or in some cases the selectmen of her town to claim child support. The man she accused could not be convicted of fornication (confession or witnesses were needed for that), but unless there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he would be judged the “reputed father” of her child and required to pay for its support. The assumption was that a woman asked to testify at the height of travail would not lie.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

“Alice Metherell of Kittery, Maine, had been convicted of a false oath in an earlier case of bastardy (she had delivered a black child after accusing a white man), she was able in 1695 to get maintenance from John Thompson and even to defend herself against a slander suit from him.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812