An interesting work. The fact that this 445 page book has a 35 page introduction and almost 100 pages of Epilogue, Notes , and Index will give you some idea of it's complexity. The Author has taken Mrs. Ballard's diary and supplimented it with every historical document of the time and place. A very interesting, and different look at the life and times of women in the late 1700's, early 1800's. ( )

This book altered the way I view things. The author has an ability to find and see the value of details to describe an historical period. ( )

This really didn't do a whole lot for me. Mind you, it is out of my comfort zone -- I rarely read history, biography what have you. This basically is a social history based on the diary of a midwife and traditional healer in rural Maine at the end of the 18th century. As I am an obstetrician, I looked forward to the descriptions of labor and delivery and its complications from so long ago, from when I perceived so little could really be done. But her diary and the resulting commentary was very sparing with medical details; and this was a big disappointment for me. She would say things like -- "I removed the obstruction and everthing turned out cleverly." What the hell? What obstruction? What was she talking about, fercrissakes? "Her illness increased until I enquired into her case and then the babe was deliverd." -- What exactly did you do? -- frustruating.

Instead we get segments of the diary from random yet, chronological portions of Martha Ballard's life and they are tedious to read. The old Enlglish spelling (or lack thereof) and bizzare capitalization was grating and despite the author's assertions that the details of her mundane life were actually interesting and important ("wast cloaths, workd in gardin, etc, etc, ad nauseum") -- they weren't to me. Ulrich's fleshing out of the story, as it were, in the commentary was much better and did manage to hold my interest. More so when discussing medical, or historical details as opposed to the way households and their accounts were managed. I was impressed by Ballard's realtively good numbers reagrding maternal and neonatal mortality given the times - I did notice however she seemed to be delivering women who has already successfully given birth before. Back then the ones who couldn't deliver naturally were weeded out by death the first time around and never passed on the genes for their narrow pelvises.

I am sure this is a well-done example of its genre as, I guess, its' Pulitzer prize can attest to - but it really was not my thing. It just was not what I expected and looked forward to. It does get better as it goes along but still, I felt like there was some fascinating information just out of reach -- and what was left was really a stretch to make into a whole and worthwhile book. ( )

This is a work of non-fiction, based on a diary kept by a midwife in Maine from 1785 to 1812. I heard about the book in my intro to archives class, during my first semester at library school. I gave my mom a copy for Christmas that year, and picked up a copy for myself just a few weeks ago at the League of Women Voters annual book sale here.

It is not a transcription of the diary itself, but each chapter starts with a selection from the diary. See, the diary itself is not a terribly exciting read, and most readers would miss the important aspects. The spelling and grammar is not standardized at all. Entries are between a couple sentences to a paragraph long.

Ulrich's background information and commentary on the diary is the interesting part. She explains what Martha is writing about, and makes connections of information and themes throughout the years. She has kept all the generations of John Shaws straight for us, and provided an index and copious notes.

The most valuable part of this book, I think, is the description of sexual morals and reality in the new United States -- and thus probably also England -- at the turn of the 19th century. We think of the people of the thirteen colonies that formed the U.S. as Puritans, and we probably draw most of our assumptions about their sexuality from The Scarlet Letter and the like. According to Martha Ballard's dairy and Ulrich's research, this idea we have are not really accurate.

In reality, according to Martha and Ulrich, premarital sex was the norm, though not really talked about. Judging by the date of women's first children, a lot of women get married after they were already pregnant, some getting married very shortly before their babies were born. 38% of the first babies Martha delivered were conceived out of wedlock. 38%! Of these, about three quarters of the mothers married the fathers. The law gave unwed mothers opportunity to sue for child support -- and, unlike today, the powers that be were pretty happy with this, as it forced men to take responsibility for their actions.

In Martha's own family, her son Jonathan was forced to marry a young woman after the woman had given birth to her and Jonathan's child. As the midwife, Martha had the sticky place of helping the young woman in childbirth, and being a main enforcer of the social norms of marriage as well. All in all, as long as you got married before, or even shortly after, a child was born, it was ok. Aside from Jonathan, two of Martha's other children also were pregnant/had a pregnant partner before their weddings.

Also, the wedding itself was not terribly important, aside from making everything legal and religious. The date that is celebrated and commemorated is the one a couple "goes to housekeeping," that is, the day they move in together. This day might be several weeks, maybe even a month or two after the actual marriage. In the intervening time, the couple would visit each other at their parents' houses, spend overnights, and finish collecting the things they would need to set up house. But, the days and weeks leading up to the wedding looked much the same, with the groom-to-be visiting his affianced in her parents' house, and often spending the night. In Martha's diary, the weddings of her children and nieces barely gets mentioned among all the other goings on.

Another interesting aspect is the discussion of the changes in medical practice going on at the time. Medicine was becoming more professionalized, and male doctors were taking over many of the functions that female practitioners had long been performing. The men were also blending a more emergency, interventionist approach to medicine into the women's kind of routine care. All this is especially visible in Martha's field of midwifery. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the men's way of doing things did not produce much better results than the women's, and in some cases the women's produced better results. Martha, for example, lost very few patients in her many years of practicing.

I highly recommend this book for those interested in women's history, history of the early United States, or medical history. That it is based on, and transcribes parts of, a primary document makes it especially valuable.

There is also a movie, which works a lot like the book. We see Ulrich working with the manuscript, hear parts of the diary being read, and see very accurate reenactments of what the diary discusses.

This is one of the most important works in both women's history and Maine history for the post-Revolutionary period. ( )