Summary Of A Midwife's Tale

This generation of women, may it be young or old, are fortunate to live in a country where you can be anything, do anything, and say anything that men can. Although in theory the playing fields are still not completely even, we as a nation have made some substantial progress in women’s rights. Just a few hundred years ago, women livered mundane lives and rarely got to speak up for themselves. In the book, The Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, it follows the life of Martha Ballard through the use of her own diary. Martha Ballard captures the lives of common women in the Early Republic Era by providing an authentic record of the role women played in their communities throughout the developmental years of the United States.

Being a midwife does not only defined by assisting women in childbirth. The general dictionary definition are the misconception of how people view midwives. Being a midwife means to be ‘with women’ and this leads the construction of the midwifery philosophy, Page (2006) 5 steps and Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) competency standards, in order to provide the best women centred care (Australia Collage of Midwives, 2017). This essay will cover a constructive overview of what Page (2006) 5 steps of being a midwife means, it will also defined what women centred care is and emphasis on the importance it has for the woman. Understanding Page (2006) 5 steps and women centred care helped build the pathway for midwifery philosophy to correlate with NMBA competency standard in order to support midwifery practice. For

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich proves with this book is that the every day journal entries that may seem mundane and unimportant at first are actually very important to understanding Martha’s life. If one is to truly understand Martha Ballard’s life historians must dive deeper than the larger, more attention grabbing details of her diary, such as the Puritan family incident. It is the daily seemingly “less important” events that can show Martha’s internal struggles and emotions of what she had to go through as being a women during that time period.

     Before I watched 'A Midwife's Tale', a movie created from the diary found by Laurel Ulrich chronicling the life of a woman named Martha Ballard, I thought the women in these times were just housewives and nothing else. I pictured them doing the cleaning and the cooking for their husbands and not being very smart because of the lack of education or them being unable to work. My view on the subject changed however when I watched this specific woman's life and her work.

Throughout most of history women generally have had fewer legal rights and career opportunities than men. Wifehood and motherhood were regarded as women's most significant professions. Since early times women have been uniquely viewed as a creative source of human life. Historically, however, they have been considered not only intellectually inferior to men but also a major source of temptation and evil. Colonial women faced the harsh realities of childbirth, housework, and serving their husbands because it was tradition. The ways of the ‘old country’ culture was forced upon a new one, disallowing any room for new ideals. Although constrained by society Colonial women have had their part in shaping America.

Robin Yates’s paper, “Pregnancy and Childbirth, The 1800’s vs. Now: What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting,” was filled with many clear points on the advancement of labor and medicine since the 1800s. This essay was filled with interesting and grabbing facts; however, the structure of the essay needs more support.

The book describes how complex societal dictation dominated the lives of women and left no room for growth as a unique individual with a passion other than homemaking. It called upon women to take a stand against these so called norms and “seek new opportunities for themselves” (“Betty Friedan”). It instantly became sensation and “continues to be regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century” (Michals). It struck a nerve with all women alike, leading to a “feminist explosion” (Kaplan) because of the recognition of themselves in Friedan’s work (Parry) and the familiarity shared between the women created a sense of community. It also brought public awareness to the glamorized domestication of

Ann Marie Low’s diary opens in 1927 when she is a teenager living with her family on a stock farm in southeastern North Dakota. Low’s diary tells the story of her family's struggle to maintain a way of life, keeping their farm, and educate their children. She discusses her family and friends, descendants of homesteaders, through the next ten years, a time when entire communities lost their homes to mortgages and to government recovery programs. Low’s faces economic hardship, unfortunate family circumstances, and the restrictions that society had placed on women. Low's diary is about life in during the Dust Bowl, and Great Depression.

There was a very different scene in the household of American families. During the early 1800s, a woman’s life consisted of many obligations and few choices. Women were pretty much controlled by the men in their life, their fathers, brothers, and husbands. The life would consist of finding a husband, reproducing, and then spending the rest of their lives helping the family in the house. In fact, when women became married, legally all of her inheritance and belongings would belong to her husband.

Medical knowledge and the production of textiles were valuable and necessary commodities – medical knowledge was essential for everyday problems as well as during outbreaks of disease. Textiles were crucial for the local and national economy as they were locally produced, traded and exported. Martha was a midwife who helped successfully bring hundreds of babies into the world and she was also played a huge role in seeing to the wellness and welfare of the community. As a midwife, Martha served anyone who required her, regardless of their religion, race or place in society. Socializing was an important part of daily life. Even when Martha spent days at home, she was still connected to the locals, which is evident in the way she described the visitors she had. In 1790 alone, “Martha recorded 642 encounters, at home or abroad with 299 persons outside her family” (Ulrich 92). Martha was paid for her services – she sometimes had to travel great distances in treacherous weather to reach her patients and she kept records in her diary about the circumstances she found herself in while carefully recording births, deaths, marriages, weather, and other events, both important and mundane.

Martha Ballard: a woman, a midwife, and an unconscious documenter of feminine history. She is the focal point of this historical writing and is well defined by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the author of A Midwife’s Tale. Ulrich examines Martha’s contributions to her time period through her occupation and documented actions. The descriptions provided allow for an unusual insight to the on goings of 18th century American culture, and women’s place in that realm. Martha was recognized as an individual of religious background and was educated in medical procedure, as well as in the ability to read and write. Ulrich defined her as a storyteller, one who shared her life through the survival of her diary. In this diary, Martha created forms for record-keeping,

Call the Midwife fills that need we have to see how poor people live and also serve them. These midwifes spend their time serving members of the community no matter the problems that arise and we don’t often recognize that effort. These women as we talked about in class also often don’t have people supporting them and they are taken advantage of, so seeing them be cared for in such a supportive way is amazing. The emotional bond that the show thrives on is vital because people don’t always make connections with facts and tables but hearing stories of a young girl in a workhouse or having to give up their child because they were unwed and forced into prostitution, makes it real. I started watching the show a couple years ago and while it may not be the perfect solution to learning about this time and place compared to history texts and the like because it is a TV drama after all. But seeing the people interacting or even learning about how a woman’s body works during pregnancy and childbirth is so important. So many things they do in the show or in Jennifer Worth’s books have never occurred to be before I started watching and reading because poverty and pregnancy isn’t really talked about. We haven’t escaped that woman’s world being separate from the rest of the work and seeing how these people and especially women lived is important.

Mildred Pierce is a work of realistic fiction that takes place in one of America’s most troublesome times, the period between the start of the Great Depression, and the beginning of the second world war. The protagonist, the book’s namesake, Mildred Pierce, is a woman who is tasked with raising two children on her own since her deadbeat husband refused to get a job, and decided instead to philander with another. This put Mildred into a predicament where she had to work tirelessly to support her family, and provide security during the unrelenting times of hardship. However, as we see many times throughout the novel, this was no simple task for a woman living in this time period. James’s M. Cain’s, Mildred Pierce, masterfully illustrates the hardships of the working woman in 1930s America.

In Alice Walker’s Meridian, the portrayal of characters and their surroundings gives great insight to the world of moral and domestic standards for both women and men in the 1960s. Walker characterizes Meridian Hill and Anne-Marion Coles as two different women with strong personalities and ideals between them and implements a modernist approach in the novel by manipulating the sequence of time to create an understanding of the social and behavioral conventions specific to the female gender in that era. Meridian describes the transformation of these roles from rigidity to progressively indistinct boundaries. Nonconformity is becoming more common as time goes on, and in the age of the 1960s anything and everything can happen.

As a midwife, mother, and medicinal worker in revolutionary America, Martha Ballard demonstrates the tenacity of women in this era. She works endlessly, serves people in need, runs her own household, and engages in economic and social affairs sometimes all in the same day. Combining these facets of her life, Ballard creates a unique identity for herself in her world, and this identity reveals itself through the entries in her personal journal. Ballard’s identity is composed of her value of labor and aid to others, her Christian values, as well as her sense of self-worth or importance in society. Despite living in a primarily patriarchal culture, Ballard’s story breaks down structural barriers and paves the way for a more innovative, inclusive America during the revolution.