Book Review: A Midwife's Tale

 A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.  

464 pages (main text is about 400 pages; the rest is appendix and notes) • first pub 1990.  Pulitzer Prize winner in 1991 in the History category.

(For the full First Lines May 2024 edition, follow this link.)

When our children were ages 7, 5, and 1, we all accompanied their Dad (the Common Household Husband) on his business trip to Toronto, Canada.  Daddy went off to his scientific conference all day, while I attempted to drive around an unfamiliar city to take the kids to museums.  We converged as a family in the evening, lining up in our one hotel room like sardines, with no energy left except to watch TV.   The family-appropriate show that we found was a reality-type show (maybe this one?) about a family that lives for a year in a house without any modern conveniences.  The women spent all day just trying to keep the dust at bay.  I can’t remember what the men did.  The family’s existence seemed exhausting and bleak.  

This is the closest I have come to being
a Pioneer Housewife.

The book A Midwife’s Tale, which my sister-in-law, a midwife by training, recommended to me, had echoes of that TV show. 

It's a historical treatise, meaning that the author examines a primary source, the diary of a midwife in (what would become the state of) Maine in the late 1700s-early 1800s.  The historian is able to take the terse diary entries, amplify them with the history of the time, and weave it all to tell the story of a strong, hard working woman.  

The historian author, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, was the first to publish the now-famous phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history," writing in a scholarly journal in 1976.  In 2007 she published a book with that title (it’s now on my reading list).  She is a Pulitzer- and Bancroft-Prize-winning historian, a feminist, and a Mormon.

A Midwife’s Tale shows that in late 1700s America, a midwife provided not only her medical skills at a birth, but also her skills generally as a healer.  Martha Ballard attended to many ailments in her community. There was no shortage of additional non-midwife tasks – combing flax, weaving cloth, raising crops, managing livestock, giving birth to and raising her own children, and all of the management of the family and household.

 

In that era, extramarital sex (as evidenced by the resulting pregnancy) was a common thing and not as severely dealt with as I would have thought.  The knowledge of the time said that if a woman pregnant out of wedlock was asked, during the process of giving birth, who the father was, she was incapable of telling a lie in that moment.  It was part of the midwife’s job to ask this question and record the answer.  Often, the birth occurred and then the named father married the mother.

 

Midwives had dominion over the birthing process until forceps were invented, and then doctors (men) horned in on the process.  Doctors (men) also invented the latest up-to-date medical techniques, such as bleeding a patient.

Men working in the kitchen.
My father (on the left) is squatting Pakistani style
(a skill he learned as an infant and child) and
my brother (attempting the squat)
are shelling nuts or cardamoms
or something for the biryani.

 

I was surprised not to find more in this book about abortions, but that might be for several reasons:

 

The illnesses are sometimes described obliquely.  Often Midwife Ballard would write that the person was “feeling unwell” which could mean: in labor, sick with a sore throat, infested with worms (yup – trigger warning!), or sick with just about anything.  There could be a number of euphemisms used to describe abortion.  (But Ulrich does not say anything about abortions or contraception.)

 I didn’t read the appendix first.  There are 8 pages listing the medicines used by Martha Ballard.  Some of these have uses listed such as

Hops: “bring down the courses”;

Pennyroyal: “deobstruent, particularly in hysteric and other female complaints”;

Rue: Used to promote menstruation;

Maybe the use of such herbs could denote an attempt to end a pregnancy?

 

The late 1790s to early 1800s in the territory of Maine was an era of contention over property rights (between factions of White people – the native population had already been forced away) with some shocking violence, as described in this book.

 

A few other tidbits: It seems that the Boston Tea Party was not the only instance where white men dressed up as natives in order to cause trouble.  Debtor’s prison was a thing, but the debtor could roam the town (to work, eat, drink etc) as long as he stayed the night in the prison.

 

When quoting the diary, the historian maintains the variable spellings of the original text, which makes for slower reading, but at least I didn’t have to try to read 18th century handwriting.  The prose sometimes got a bit dry, but overall I found it to be a fascinating portrayal of a woman important to her community.

Me doing my bit for women's well being. 
Can you tell I was (and still am) furious?