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Martha Moore Ballard |
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Martha Moore Ballard, midwife and diarist, is known only through her diary, which she kept faithfully for more than twenty-seven years. Presented and interpreted by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990) and published in full by a small press in 1992, the diary is of inestimable value as one of only a handful of surviving personal writings by American women of the late eighteenth century. Concentrating on her daily life, Ballard's diary offers a tantalizing glimpse into the network of her relationships and activities--whether at home or delivering a baby miles away--depicting the life of a dedicated healer and housewife in a newly settled Maine town during the years immediately following the American Revolution. The concerns of the diary--the relationship between women's and men's economies, the growing influence of male physicians, the legal consequences of debt, family quarrels, marriage and sexual mores, violent land disputes, murder and rape, and above all the professional life of a dedicated and energetic healer--provide details of hitherto almost unknown women's history, as well as the communal and social elements of early American history that contemporary men's diaries tend to ignore.
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