‘A Midwife’s Tale’ — The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

At a time when very few women could read and write, during the post-Revolution Confederation period in America, Martha Ballard took the time to record, in meticulous detail, her medical practice as a healer and midwife, her daily activities and visitors, the intricate barter and payment system between the various households in her town, and even the weather. She also gave us a glimpse of the scandals of the time, including the charge of rape against a judge and the murder of an entire family.

Martha was 50 years old when she started her diary. We will never know if she had an earlier edition, but the one she started in 1785 survived by being passed down through her female descendants until it was donated to the Maine State Library in Augusta, the name today of the southern part of Hallowell, Maine, where Martha lived and worked in her adult years.

Martha bore nine children and lost three of them in childhood to diphtheria. In those years, diseases such as diphtheria and scarlet fever ran unchecked through communities, mostly in the late summer. The local women took turns nursing sick members of a household, bringing them food and cooking and cleaning for them. They laid out the dead and attended services for their burial. The more skilled healers among them, such as Martha, concocted medicines to ease the symptoms, from herbs they grew themselves and items they collected, such as roots and the bark from various trees. She never engaged in bloodletting or promoted the practice. Apparently, the use of a lancet was one of the few ways male doctors were distinguished from female healers in rural settings.

One of the most skilled midwives in the area, Martha delivered almost 1,000 babies in her time. She traveled back and forth across the Kennebec River, frozen or not, and up and down the length of the town on horseback at all hours of the day and night, staying away from home for many hours at a time to care for her neighbors in time of travail. So skilled a midwife was she that her maternal-fetal mortality rate was lower than that of the male doctors in her region.

Her great-niece, Clara Barton, was the founder of the Red Cross in 1881, so Martha’s devotion to her community and her skills were definitely an example to her family.

Interwoven in the diary entries of illnesses, labors, and births, Martha gives us glimpses of her home life. She talks about the mill that her husband runs, his travels and duties as a selectman, and how her grown daughters learn to take on household responsibilities. Unmarried women, such as grown daughters and sisters, often lived in other households to help out while learning skills and supporting themselves.

Historian Lauren Thatcher Ulrich pieces together the social fabric of Martha’s time and community from the diary entries. Martha had a loom that appears to have been used by several of the women in Hallowell, and they bartered for the use of it with other goods and services. Spinning and weaving flax and sheep wool were the main ways that households obtained cloth for clothes, bed linens, and other everyday items such as towels. I know from personal experience that there is a lot of work needed to bring raw material to the point where it can be spun.

A similar amount of work would go into growing, harvesting, and preparing most of the food that the family would eat, as well as the simples and concoctions that healers used. There was very little rest time for either men or women of that era. Even when sitting down to visit with neighbors and friends, some piece of work was always in hand.

I grew up with a similar practice that has endured all my life. It was a rare occasion when my grandmother or great aunts were not employed at mending, sewing, or knitting while relaxing with a movie on the television. I was taught how to knit at age 5, so the devil would not find work for my idle hands, and I could learn to make myself useful.

Martha’s life was not easy, especially as she grew older. Her daughters left home to start their own families, and she and her husband faced economic hardship. However, she kept going, nursing the sick and delivering babies until shortly before her death at 77 in 1812.

The early 1800s were not an easy time for independent women. White men were allowed titles and offices in town and county leadership and in the church, while women were relatively invisible and marginalized in official records. Yet, despite their apparent invisibility, Martha recorded the intricacies of women’s social and economic lives and their importance in holding their community together.

Ulrich is a devout Mormon and feminist. In 1976, she wrote an essay about forgotten Puritan funeral rites performed by women of the time, which included the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

Ulrich later said she meant that well-behaved women were not studied by historians, not to encourage contemporary women to rebel. But the phrase has since become famous.