![]() ![]() ![]() Between her college teaching job and raising five children, it took Ulrich eight years to bring Ballard’s story to light.Īccording to her diary records, Ballard performed 816 deliveries in and around the growing frontier town of Hallowell, Maine, on the Kennebec River, which she often traversed by canoe in order to reach her patients. “Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.” Ulrich received $2,500 from NEH in 1982, followed by an $18,500 NEH fellowship in 1983 to pursue her study of Ballard’s diary. “Curiously, a feminist history of midwifery published in the 1970s repeated the old dismissal: ‘Like many diaries of farm women, it is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes,’” quoted Ulrich. Unlike previous historians who had disregarded the diary, she saw something extraordinary. Ulrich encountered the diary accidently while doing research at the Maine State Library. A Midwife’s Tale was based on Ballard’s cryptic diary that she kept diligently for more than twenty-seven years between 17-9,965 days to be exact. It won a Pulitzer Prize, a Bancroft Prize, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History, and several more. ![]() Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s groundbreaking micro-history of Ballard’s life and society in Revolutionary New England hit the bookstores in 1990. But that’s what Martha Moore Ballard became. At first glance, a middle-aged midwife in rural Maine doesn’t seem a likely heroine for a best-selling book or film. ![]()
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