Laurel Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale Essay

Laurel Ulrich's Midwife Tale did a good job interpreting and using Martha Ballard's diary to provide a descriptive and impartial account of the 18th century period in women's history, with particular insight into colonial attitudes towards rape. Ulrich's method of piecing together the event of Rebecca Foster's rape has Martha Ballard's diary as a starting point, is chronologically structured, thorough and attempts to cover any historically relevant information by expanding on various adjacent sources

in the documentary A Midwife’s Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. A Midwife’s Tale explores the life of Martha Ballard, a midwife in 18th and 19th century Maine, through the woman’s diary and other sources. Ulrich uses these sources to construct an almost complete narrative of Martha Ballard’s life and to connect it with the broader historical context of Ballard’s time and geography, in a manner that exemplifies Arnold’s historical inquiry process.

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.” This is a quote that was taken from a scholarly article written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The article for this assignment discusses how this single line ignited a fire within the female population across the nation. Ulrich published her article that was titled with this line in 1976. From there, it was used in 1995, when journalist Kay Mills used it as an epigraph for her informal history of American women, From Pocahontas to Power Suits. The article’s

Martha Ballard, while to many the messiah of Maine, might have been more of a parading pestilence as she moved throughout the town giving treatment and illness, one and the same. Throughout Martha Ballard’s diary and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s transcription of such, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, various examples of transmission can be seen with some cases leaving individuals dead and families destroyed. Such sicknesses included Dysentery, Scarlet Fever, and unidentified illnesses. While

details Adams’ development from a giddy girl into the sophisticated, sassy woman who did not stand in her husband’s shadow. She took her life by the reigns and never stopped learning. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich similarly accounts for Martha Ballard’s journey as a successful midwife and family woman in A Midwife’s Tale, letting Martha’s voice flow from the pages through excerpts of her conserved diary. Ballard maintained a separate life from her husband and controlled her responsibilities. In the two

t-shirt that she bought at a recent SCA event. I have never thought much about the slogan except for the fact that it generally represents women who make themselves known in unforgettable ways and are remembered mostly for disrupting the status quo. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, an author and professor of history at Harvard University, introduced the phrase in a 1976 journal article about the characterization of women in Puritan funeral sermons. Ulrich more recently wrote a book, based on the phrase, that

fields, stores, healthcare, and in religious ceremonies. Without them, society would have fallen- women kept the world turning. Yet we know so little about the lives of everyday women. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, famed early American and women’s historian, decoded the diary of Martha Ballard in her book The Midwife’s Tale, to bring us understanding and insight into the lives of many women in the 18th century. Ulrich is a devout believer in studying the lives of ordinary women to understand history.