The Midwife's Tale Analysis

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.

In First Generations Women in Colonial America, Carol Berkin demonstrates the social, political, and economic circumstances that shaped and influenced the lives of women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the colonies. In exploring these women’s lives and circumstances it becomes clear that geography, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, and other factors less fixed such as war each influenced a woman’s experience differently and to varying degrees. In doing this, Berkin first showcases the life of a specific woman and then transposes that life onto the general historical framework and provides a context in which this woman would have lived. The lives of these women exemplified is also explored and demonstrated through the use of comparison to highlight their different experiences. Moreover, this analysis also seeks to identify the varied sources of these women’s power, albeit for many this power was limited. The analysis is broken up primarily by geography, then by race, and lastly by time and war. While these factors provide the overarching context of analysis, more specific factors are also introduced.

“Revolutionary Mothers Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence,” is a book written by Carol Berkin. In this writing, Berkin goes into detail on the important role women of the 1600s-1700s took place during the Home Front War. Berkin argues that it wasn’t just the men who fought for independence, but women fought for freedom as well. The book describes the roles that different women faced, the challenges women faced, and women’s capabilities during the war.

A Midwife’s Tale is a book written by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The book itself is publishing and presenting the daily diary entries of Martha Ballard in an organized and professional way so that it could be published as a book. The diary entries begin in 1785 when Martha Ballard was already 50, and continue up until a few weeks before her death May 7, 1812.

After studying women and gender history in early America for the past semester, my views about American history have changed tremendously. Having very little prior experience with history, I had many assumptions and preconceived notions from high school history classes. Women were never even mentioned in my previous learning about U.S. history, so I assumed they took on unimportant roles and had little, if any, impact on shaping our country’s history. However, after this semester of delving deeply into the women of early America, I could not have been more incorrect. Although they were not typically in the public realm, we cannot fully understand history without studying women. The following readings uncovered the roles of women in the private sphere and were crucial to my new understanding of the importance of women in American history by bringing women to the forefront.

     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.

Women did not have an easy life during the American Colonial period. Before a woman reached 25 years of age, she was expected to be married with at least one child. Most, if not all, domestic tasks were performed by women, and most domestic goods and food were prepared and created by women. Women performed these tasks without having any legal acknowledgment. Although women had to endure many hardships, their legal and personal lives were becoming less restricted, although the change was occurring at a snail’s pace.

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.

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.

History has always been heavily dominated by men, and for women to earn a spot in history means that they would need to do something extraordinary. In “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, she points out several famous women in history that fit the mold of extraordinary. Through discussing Mae West, Rosa Parks, and Martha Ballard, Ulrich makes the claim that women rarely make history unless they have broken away from the norms of their society. By explaining the individual historical cases and her own opinion, accompanied by visual representations of her view, Ulrich argues how history dictates who gets a spot in history and who gets forgotten. However, a place in history depends on how out of the ordinary

A Midwife’s Tale opens a window into the life of a woman living in the late eighteenth century. The book uses Martha Ballard’s journal entries as she goes about her everyday life to exam the effects of the revolutionary age of America on an obscure citizen. “Her story allows us to see what was lost, as well as what was gained, in political, economic, and social transformations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Martha’s daily habits that are written throughout her journal are an effective way of looking into the past and seeing how it has affected us today. “The late eighteenth century was not only an era of political revolution, but of medical, economic, and sexual transformation.

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.

In the midwife's apprentice alyces self esteem changes from the begging to the end by starting out feeling lonley and very poorly about her sellf she thinks then she starts to work for Jane and still feels like she did before then she birthed the baby and she felt great about her self then when she is asked to birth the bailiffs wife's sisters baby and fails all of her self esteem go away and she runs away and says she can't d anything she is nothing she cant do nothing so she makes it to the inn and really starts to help then the mother that claims she has a stomach worm but it's a baby alyce just wants to say back but she ends up help give birth to a baby boy and the parents see her as a god becuase she gave them there healthy boy and the

A woman’s work in eighteenth and even nineteenth century can be described by a familiar proverb – a woman’s work is never done. Nowadays, we have a chance to get acquainted with their lifestyles due to the diaries that some of these women wrote during their lives. A number of scientific researchers are based on these dairy’s entries. Even when there is not much information about women’s work on early America, Martha Ballard’s diary is a valuable source for such a study. She recorded her arduous work and domestic life with homemade ink, in Maine between 1785 and 1812. She was fifty years old when she began writing her diary on January 1st, 1785. During this period of history, Americans were attempting to build a new nation. The ratification of the Constitution in 1780, gave them enough stability to expand their manufacturing, trade and farming.

"The writing of modern history has resulted in a viewpoint that is nothing short of a stag party. The history of women is ignored, hushed up, and censored in the most literal sense of the term. This method of eliminating the social and political destiny