One of Ariel Lawhon’s major inspirations for her novel, “The Frozen River”, was Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s excellent history “A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary 1785-1812”. Ulrich won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for her book, which is still in print.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, “A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own” (The New York Times Book Review).
Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard but of her society. At once lively and impeccably scholarly, A Midwife’s Tale is a triumph of history on a human scale.
About the Author
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was born in Sugar City, Idaho. She holds degrees from the University of New Hampshire, University of Utah, and Simmons College. She is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University and past president of the American Historical Association. As a MacArthur Fellow, Ulrich worked on the PBS documentary based on her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Midwife’s Tale. Her work is also featured on an award-winning website called dohistory.org. She is immediate past president of the Mormon History Association. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The PBS documentary mentioned above aired on January 19, 1998. Here is the description for the film:
A Midwife’s Tale
Eighteenth-century America through a woman’s eyes
Film Description
To understand eighteenth-century America through a woman’s eyes, historian and author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich spent eight years working through Martha Ballard’s massive but cryptic diary, full of entries like the one above. “A Midwife’s Tale,” produced by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt and directed by Richard P. Rogers, chronicles the interwoven stories of two remarkable women: an eighteenth-century midwife and healer and the twentieth-century historian who brought her words to light.
Ulrich unearthed Ballard’s diary in the Maine State Library and was immediately captivated. “The story was in the details,” says Ulrich. “When I finally was able to connect Martha’s work to her world, I could begin to create stories.” “A Midwife’s Tale” unfolds as a detective story with Ulrich puzzling out fragments from Ballard’s diary entries — always conscious that these eighteenth-century details are overlooked treasures that are rich in the texture of everyday life.
In 1785, America was a rough and chaotic young nation, and Maine its remote northern frontier. That year, at the age of 50, Martha Ballard began the diary that she would keep for the next 27 years, until her death. At a time when fewer than half the women in America were literate, Ballard faithfully recorded the weather, her daily household tasks, her midwifery duties (she delivered close to a thousand babies), her medical practice, and countless incidents that reveal the turmoil of a new nation — dizzying social change, intense religious conflict, economic boom and bust — as well as the grim realities of disease, domestic violence, and debtor’s prison.
“Without documents,” notes Ulrich, “there is no history. And women left very few documents behind.” By cataloging diary entries and cross-referencing other documents that mentioned the people Ballard encountered and events she experienced on her constant travels as midwife and healer, Ulrich painstakingly recreated Ballard’s world.
For five years, Kahn-Leavitt and Rogers collaborated with Ulrich to craft an innovative film that combines dramatic scenes of Martha Ballard’s life with interviews of Ulrich at work as historian, mapping out the relationships and events recorded in the diary and making the connections that reveal the realities of Ballard’s life and the complex web of relationships within her community. The stories told on screen are the result of countless hours spent piecing together the layout of Hallowell, Maine, where Ballard lived; the characters inhabiting her daily life; and the status and role of women in this post-revolutionary world.
“‘A Midwife’s Tale’ represents the combined efforts of a talented team of people who struggled with the constraints of filmmaking to tell an important story,” says executive producer Margaret Drain. “Faced with the challenge of having no visual images to work with — no photographs, not even a painted portrait of Martha Ballard — Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, Richard Rogers, and their collaborators have broken ground on a new style of historical documentary.”
“Reaction to this story has been tremendous. I didn’t realize it would move people as deeply as it has,” says Kahn-Leavitt. “But this is precisely what history should do; it should be provocative. It should take you to a foreign place that nevertheless makes you rethink your own life and times.”
Martha Ballard is played by actress Kaiulani Sewall Lee, a direct descendant of the Sewall family of Maine — people the real Martha Ballard knew, aided in childbirth, and nursed through illness.
via PBS
The film can now only be seen via DVD. Check your local library/Hoopla as it might be available to borrow, and it’s also available on Amazon.
American Experience – A Midwife’s Tale
Based on her personal diary, this program presents a dramatic exploration of the life of Martha Ballard, a woman who lived through the economic boom and bust, and political and social turmoil of the decades following the American Revolution. The video is approximately three minutes longer than the broadcast version.
- Run time : 1 hour and 30 minutes
- Release date : June 13, 2006