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...