A Midwife's Tale Summary

A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich examines the 1785-1812 diary of Martha Ballard, a midwife in Hallowell, Maine. Ballard composed concise daily entries that chronicle her domestic work, deliveries and nursing, as well as community events. These entries, coupled with Ulrich’s extensive archival research, show the complexity of the female economy and its interactions with the mercantile economy of the late 18th century. Ulrich presents the masculine and feminine economic interactions through the analogy of a checkered cloth. As the weaver wove together white and blue thread, squares of white, blue, and intermixed squares emerged. “Think of the white treads as woman’s activities, the blue was men’s, then imagine the resulting social web. Clearly, some activities n the eighteenth-century town brought men and women together. Others defined their separateness.” This illustration provides a framework for economic analysis. The blue squares are the traditionally …show more content…
Ballard both maintained a successful domestic economy through her garden and weaving and worked outside the home to support her family through her midwifery. Ballard’s life shows the complexity of the female economy in New England and shows the first signs of social and economic changes that occurred in the decades after Martha Ballard’s death. Patricia Cline Cohen picks up the mantel of female economic change and explores the story of a woman who defied the social and economic conventions of womanhood in New England in The Murder of Helen Jewett. Helen Jewett was a prostitute in New York City who was murdered in 1836 and captured widespread media attention. Cohen’s examination of her life and the intrigue around her murder present a portrait of a woman who defied her conventional domestic roots to fashion a dominate and society defying identity in the emerging economy of the