A Midwife's Tale- Authors Intent

The book A Midwife's Tale was constructed by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. It is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Ulrich proves himself to be a fairly craft historian through the writing of this book. The book is entirely about the life of Martha Ballard and the community that she lived in. It is based mainly upon a diary that Martha kept between the years 1785-1812.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was the first person to truly take Martha's thoughts seriously. She was the first one to peer beyond the sex prattle and see all of the historical facts that lied just beyond it. Ulrich is a professor of history at Harvard. Many historians had thumbed through Martha's diary before her but none had taken it seriously.

When Ulrich flipped through Martha's writings she saw much more potential. She gave Martha the credit that no one else had and constructed an entire work around it. She discovered that there was much to learn from these writings. Martha could not have made it very easy on Ulrich as she was a woman of very little emotion and kept her entry's as precise as possible. Through her writings we discover that she was not a woman of great emotion and her many of her entry's become more repetitive and appear more like a log of births and deaths than anything. This is most likely what had turned off so many historians before Ulrich.

Ulrich took the time to decode Martha's misspellings and to look deeper into the lack of emotion to draw some more influential conclusions. She looked at the writings of another man from Martha's time as well and compared some of their recordings and found that many of them matched up in a decent fashion and from this was able to pull even more conclusions. From constructing this book and the research that it took Ulrich learned many things about what the role of women was like during this time period and the community that they all lived in.

By publishing her book she was able to share all that she had learned with many people. Ulrich is able to accurately depict the life of a midwife or any woman during the late 18th and early 19th century. She is able to outline the roles of the average woman and in doing so even the role of the average man. Through this book many things can be learned about the community that Martha lived in and what types of things Martha was expected to do as midwife. This also leads the reader to see the types of medicinal practices that were used during this time period. Ulrich saw many things in Martha's diary that historians that had come before her had missed. By publishing these things in A Midwifes Tale she found herself able to share all of those revelations with any genuinely interested person today.