Martha Ballard

Martha Moore Ballard (1734/1735 - 1812) was an American midwife, healer and diarist.

Ballard was born in Oxford, Massachusetts to Elijah Moore and Dorothy Learned Moore, and married Ephraim Ballard in 1754. The couple had nine children between 1756 and 1779, and lost three of them to a diphtheria epidemic in Oxford in the summer of 1769.

A Midwife's Tale: The Diary

Between 1785 and 1812, Martha Moore Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work and domestic life in Hallowell, on the Kennebec River, District of Maine. The sometimes cryptic log of daily events, written with a quill pen and homemade ink, records numerous babies delivered and illnesses treated as she traveled by horse or canoe around the Massachusetts frontier in what is today the state of Maine. Her writing also illustrates struggles and tragedies within her own family, local crimes and scandals, and provides a woman's perspective on political events then unfolding in the nascent years of the early American republic. Other aspects of society in the late 18th century and early 19th century, including daily activities, medical practices, religious squabbles and sexual mores, add color to Ballard's account.

Martha Moore Ballard's obituary was published on May 31, 1812 in Hallowell/Augusta, Maine. The diary was kept in her family, eventually coming into the care of her great, great granddaughter, Mary Hobart, one of America’s first female physicians. In 1930, Hobart donated the diary to the Maine State Library in Augusta.

A Midwife's Tale: A History

After eight years of painstaking research, historian and author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich produced "A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812." Ulrich's history is an intimate and densely imagined portrait of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard, and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, the nature of marriage and sexual relations, aspects of medical practice, and the prevalence of violence and crime. In 1991, "A Midwife's Tale" received the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the John S. Dunning Prize, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early Republic Book Prize, the William Henry Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the New England Historical Association Award. Later, the PBS series "The American Experience," developed "A Midwife's Tale" into a documentary film, wherein Ulrich served as a consultant, script collaborator, and narrator.

The Martha Ballard diary had been inherited by Mary Hobart, who graduated as an M.D. from the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1884, the same year that she received the diary. It was that year that Hobart was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Ballard was also related to Clara Barton, known for her Civil War work and efforts to establish the American Red Cross. Clara was the granddaughter of Ballard's sister, Dorothy Barton.

Summary

Each chapter in Midwife's Tale represents one aspect of the life of a woman in the late 18th Century. The overriding theme demonstrates how women worked to provide for their families.

Sources

Study Guide on The Midwife's Tale. The plot summary and themes sections were used as sources for this text.

External links

References

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. "A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812." Vintage Books, Random House Publishers, 1991. ISBN 0-679-73376-0.
Rogers, Richard P. and Kahn-Leavitt, Laurie. "A Midwife's Tale." PBS film, 1998.