Context
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was born in 1938 and raised in Sugar City, Idaho. She
received her B.A. from the University of Utah. Soon after, she moved to New England
and received her Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. After graduating, she
became a professor of American history at the same school, specializing in the
histories of women in early America. During this time, she married fellow teacher
Gael Ulrich and became the mother of three girls and two boys. Like the women whose
lives she studied, Ulrich gained a firsthand experience of the struggles inherent in
balancing the needs of a family with both at-home and office work. Despite this
struggle, Ulrich remained dogged in her research, finding and bringing to light the
lives of women who were so often ignored in the histories of men.
In 1982, Ulrich compiled these histories and used them as the material for her
first book, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New
England, 1650 –1750. Around this time, Ulrich was doing research in
Augusta, Maine, and decided to look up two diaries she had seen in a bibliography of
women's history. Though the first was a disappointing ten-page typescript, the other
diary belonged to a woman named Martha Ballard—two fat volumes bound in homemade
linen covers. Because she had found so few documents written by women during her
research for Good Wives, Ulrich was awed by the sheer bulk of it.
The faded ink made reading difficult, but Ulrich transcribed several pages, planning
to turn them into a grant application for a summer fellowship to study the
historically vital book. Without documentation there is no history, and women in
history had left very few documents behind. In the public histories and town records
from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women were either not mentioned at
all or were mere names attached to the dealings of their husbands—and sometimes
their names were not even correct. Other than Martha, few women had left private
records of their lives, and none so faithfully kept as Martha's had been.
Ulrich formed the idea for A Midwife's Tale soon after she
began her research. A mix of the journal itself and editorial commentary, the book
would be written in a more accessible format than the original diary and would
therefore reach a much wider audience. Though other historians had studied the
diary, they had used only the more dramatic entries in their work and dismissed the
bulk of the diary as pointless day-to-day trivia. This trivia, however, is what
Ulrich found particularly gripping: only through these small details can the lives
of women from the eighteenth century be fully revealed. Ulrich spent eight years
transforming the life she discovered in the diary into A Midwife's
Tale, which wound up being almost three times the length she had originally
planned it to be. In a speech that she later gave at Bancroft University, Ulrich
talked about how working with Martha's diary, begun when Martha was fifty years old,
helped Ulrich comprehend ways in which the second half of a person's life could be
seen as a new beginning.
Published in 1990, A Midwife's Tale debuted to highly
positive critical response. Several critics commended it for the insight it offered
into the lives of eighteenth-century women, and even more critics were impressed by
the way it illuminated life in early New England as a whole. In the educational
community, reaction to the book was even more effusive, and Ulrich earned
the Bancroft Prize, the Joan Kelly and John H. Dunning prizes, and the Pulitzer
Prize for History in 1991. Perhaps more important to Ulrich, the
success of A Midwife's Tale brought greater attention to the life
and diary of Martha Ballard. In 1992, a complete transcription of the diary, written
by Robert and Cynthia McCauseland, was finally published.
During her tenure as a MacArthur Fellow, Ulrich collaborated with filmmaker
Laurie Kahn-Leavitt on a documentary based on the book that would air on the PBS
series “The American Experience.” A simplification of A Midwife's
Tale, the documentary offers a clearer look at Martha Ballard's life by
suggesting many of its smaller moments and entirely omitting the bulk of the
historical context. Several scenes were reenacted, bolstered by dialogue but
narrated largely with voice-overs from the diary that occasionally were not included
in Ulrich's book. Ulrich herself narrated as well. In voiceovers and interviews, she
described both Martha's life and part of the process by which A Midwife's
Tale came into being. Not included in the book, this latter discussion
gave audiences a glimpse into the life of a historian as well as that of a midwife.
The documentary aired on PBS in 1997. Currently a Phillips Professor of Early
American History at Harvard University, Ulrich continues to write books that bring
the forgotten lives of early American women to light.
