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Film Analysis: A Midwife's Tale

Decent Essays

“A midwifes tale,” made in 1997, directed by Richard P. Rodgers and Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, tells the story of a hard working woman living in early America’s Maine in 1785. Martha Ballard held many roles in her lifetime, some of them being; a mother, wife, employer, aunt, nurse, and midwife. When Martha was fifty she started writing a journal about everything she saw, experienced, and accomplished for the next twenty-seven years of her life. This includes birthing over 1000 babies, along with having her own, living on a farm, watching her husbands mill burn down, and witnessing the death of her daughters. This film tells the story of Martha’s life by play reenactment, and also showing the research and information from the journal given to us by a historian, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. …show more content…

Two major primary sources included songs that were sung in the film, and even Martha Ballard’s journal. Secondary sources that helped explain Martha’s stories and feelings where the actors in each scene and what Laurel also had to say from the information she collected from the journal. Being able to hear the songs that they sang and the things that they said all acted out really puts together the feelings and ideas of what was happening at the time, both inside of the house and in the country. One scene in the film put together primary and secondary sources well. When Martha walks into a room with four children and a mother singing to a sick child. Martha was able to have a look at the child, but there was little to do to help. The film explained that only men that worked in the decal field were given medicine and tools to use to help patients to get better. From what Ulrich understood was that the boy had scarlet fever, and there was not much of anything that Martha could

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