Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier.
“I returned home to find my house up in arms.”Martha Ballard
The problem is not that the diary is trivial but that it introduces more stories than can easily be recovered and absorbed.Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
In twentieth-century terms, she was simultaneously a midwife, nurse, physician, mortician, pharmacist, and attentive wife. Furthermore, in the very act of recording her work, she became a keeper of vital records, a chronicler of the medical history of her town.Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
Women in eighteenth-century Hallowell had no political life, but they did have a community life. The base of that community life was a gender division of labor that gave them responsibility for particular tasks, products, and forms of trade.Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers
In Martha’s diary, it is doctors, not midwives, who seem marginal.Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
The technological simplicity of early medicine meant that male doctors offered little that wasn’t also available to female practitioners.Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
The diary makes quite clear that men did monopolize public business, that households were formally patriarchal, and that women did uncritically assume that houses and even babies belonged to men and that the proper way to identify a married woman was by reference to her husband,Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
Midwives were the best paid of all the female healers, not only because they officiated at births, but because they encompassed more skills, broader experience, longer memory.Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
Women’s invisibility in town records reflected the patriarchal organization of society as well as the perishable and invisible nature of their work.Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
Perhaps it was a sense of history or a craving for stability, perhaps only a practical need to keep birth records, that first motivated Martha to keep a diary.Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
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