A Midwife's Tale

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A Midwife's Tale (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
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Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 80

Sample

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was born in 1938 and raised in Sugar City, Idaho. She received her B.A. from the University of Utah. Soon after, she moved to New England and received her Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. After graduating, she became a professor of American history at the same school, specializing in the histories of women in early America. During this time, she married fellow teacher Gael Ulrich and became the mother of three girls and two boys. Like the women whose lives she studied, Ulrich gained a firsthand experience of the struggles inherent in balancing the needs of a family with both at-home and office work. Despite this struggle, Ulrich remained dogged in her research, finding and bringing to light the lives of women who were so often ignored in the histories of men.

In 1982, Ulrich compiled these histories and used them as the material for her first book, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650 –1750. Around this time, Ulrich was doing research in Augusta, Maine, and decided to look up two diaries she had seen in a bibliography of women’s history. Though the first was a disappointing ten-page typescript, the other diary belonged to a woman named Martha Ballard—two fat volumes bound in homemade linen covers. Because she had found so few documents written by women during her research for Good Wives, Ulrich was awed by the sheer bulk of it. The faded ink made reading difficult, but Ulrich transcribed several pages, planning to turn them into a grant application for a summer fellowship to study the historically vital book. Without documentation there is no history, and women in history had left very few documents behind. In the public histories and town records from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women were either not mentioned at all or were mere names attached to the dealings of their husbands—and sometimes their names were not even correct. Other than Martha, few women had left private records of their lives, and none so faithfully kept as Martha’s had been.

Ulrich formed the idea for A Midwife’s Tale soon after she began her research. A mix of the j. . .