A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is an American historian, writer, and activist. In 2018, she became the 300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita at Harvard University. Ulrich was born in Sugar City, Idaho, in 1938. She earned her BA in English and Journalism from the University of Utah before completing a master’s in English from Simmons University. She then earned a PhD in history from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught as a professor for 15 years. She then became James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History and director of the Charles Warren Center of Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is the author of six nonfiction books about history, with a special interest in both American history and feminist history. Ulrich is also a practicing member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and has written and conducted research into the Mormon religion through a feminist lens. Beyond the awards she garnered for A Midwife’s Tale, she became a MacArthur Fellow in 1992, and earned the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award from the Society of American Historians, in addition to the Charles Frankel Award.

In one of her scholarly papers in 1976 about Puritan funeral services, Ulrich wrote the sentence that has since become a wildly popular feminist slogan: “Well-behaved women seldom make history” (Lavoie, Amy.