The Frozen River

Martha Moore Ballard (1735-1812) was a New England midwife, known best by historians for her diary recording daily life in 18th-century Maine. She was informally trained but never recorded a single maternal mortality in the 816 births she recorded during her 27 years of diary-keeping. This extraordinary success rate during a time when childbirth was consistently deadly is part of what attracted Ariel Lawhon to Ballard’s story. Waiting for an appointment with her doctor while pregnant herself, Lawhon read an article about Ballard and thought to herself: “My own doctor—the one I was anxiously waiting to see—couldn’t boast a record like that” (418).

Despite her remarkable skill, Ballard remained an obscure figure until 1990, when historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich published her groundbreaking biography A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on her Diary 1785-1812. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and catapulted Martha into a position of historical importance. In A Midwife’s Tale, Ulrich argues that Ballard’s diary provides key evidence for the economic value generated by female laborers, including midwives, in colonial America. This analysis challenged traditional understandings of colonial gender roles and ushered in a new wave of historians seeking to understand pre-industrial women’s labor history.