Martha Ballard was a midwife in Hallowell, Maine in the early eighteenth century. She is the author of the diary that inspired A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Martha Ballard was an extremely busy woman with her medical duties and was very serious about being a midwife. Nothing was trivial to Martha she was serious about her work and community. She was an independent woman of her time and valued her autonomy. Her job highlighted how compassionate and caring she was towards her community. She never turned anyone away, and she would help anyone in need regardless of race, social rank, or economic standing. She relied on her connections to the people in the community in many ways. Martha was a pillar of her community because of her …show more content…
Social medicine was important to the community in eighteenth century Hallowell. Female midwives were a part of a social network. This differed from the traditional way people thought of midwives. “In western tradition, midwives have inspired fear, reverence amusement, and disdain. They have been condemned for witch craft, eulogized for Christian benevolence, and caricatured for bawdy humor and old wives’ tales” (46). This view changed in the eighteenth century because midwives were starting to be seen as a necessary part of the medical community. Midwifes were used for most births during this time, and doctors were only summoned if there was a medical emergency that was out of the midwives medical capabilities. During the delivery of children relatives and neighbors would come together for a social gathering. The most prominent physicians of Hallowell, Maine were Daniel Cony, Samuel Colman, Benjamin Page, and Benjamin Vaughan (48). Physicians believed that midwives were an important part of the medical community. Male physicians relied on more studied mainstream ways to cure diseases. In contrast, Martha believed nature alone offered cures for illnesses. However, she was not ignorant to mainstream medicine and would rely on those cures if one of her family members were in …show more content…
There was a connection between the textile economy and social medicine. Both midwifery and the production of textiles were female occupations that relied on neighborly exchange, and they both fueled the economy. “The most experienced weavers, all of them women, extended the skills of their female neighbors in much the same way midwives extended the abilities of nurses and watchers (79). The economy relied on household production. There were two different family economies in Martha Ballard’s household that was based on the gender division of labor that had specific responsibilities. The men ran the public businesses and the women handled the housework. Every employee was a daughter or niece of the family, or a neighbor’s daughter. They were all fostered by Martha and her husband. The shuffling of young women in Hallowell contributed to the social web of the community. They would trade the production of cloth with neighbors and other families in the town. Martha would record the type of exchanges between neighbors, and the compensations for services that were performed. The Ballard household had many visitors throughout the years that she recorded in her diary, and the most common names were Mrs. Savage, Mrs. Woodward, Mrs. Hamlin, Mrs. Pollard, and Mrs. Burton (93). The constant visitors and exchange of goods is the most prevalent aspect of the strong social web in the community. During this
...mes, and Paul Boyer. Notable American Women, 1607-1950. Volume III: P-Z. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Print.
What would one expect to be the sentiment of a young women who worked in the Lowell textile mills? It is just such a depressing story; and the sad heroines are the young women of Lowell - Lucy Larcom- who Stephen Yafa portrays in his excerpt “Camelot on the Merrimack.” A perception through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old Lucy Larcom reveals that, “For her and the other young girls, the long and tedious hours they spent tending to demanding machines robbed them of their childhood.” The imagery in “Camelot on the Merrimack,” from Big Cotton by Stephen H. Yafa disclose the working conditions in those sordid mills.
A multitude of mills going up created back water which hindered the mill’s wheels from turning more freely, but with more competitors came more jobs to the area. In addition to more work came the need for more workers. Francis Lowell of Massachusetts decided to make a wholesome atmosphere to attract young country women to his mill to work. He offered wholesome living with room and board, decent pay, strict rules, and curfews to enforce the safety of the girls that worked for him. These workers came to be known as the “Lowell girls”.
This novel, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, is based on Ballard’s diary starting in 1785 and ending with her death in 1812. Ulrich takes us step by step through Martha Ballard’s life as a Colonial Midwife. She reveals to us all the marvelous acts that midwives performed for their families and communities. “Midwives and nurses mediated the mysteries of birth, procreation, illness and death. They touched the untouchable, handled excrement and vomit as well as milk, swaddled the dead as well as the newborn” (Ulrich, 1990, pg.47). The novel also reveals that based on the views of societal power, gender roles in the medical environment and personal values, revealed in the diary, women were subordinate to men during this historical time period. Martha Ballard lived and thrived in this inferior atmosphere.
The 1998 PBS film, American Experience: A Midwife’s Tale is a documentary directed by Richard P. Rogers. The film is based on a book by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in which she chronicles her research concerning the diary of a colonial period midwife named Martha Ballard. Martha’s diary entries begin when she is in her early fifties in the late 18th century and span up to when she is in her seventies in the late 19th century. Martha and her husband, Ephraim Ballard had five remaining which lived with them at the time in which she began her diary as well as their niece Parthenia Barton. Martha was well respected in her town, although she her title was midwife rather than doctor, “she was usually the first one called” (Ulrich). Martha often
Kelley then uses the example of a 13-year-old girl from Pennsylvania. She calls the workers “breadwinners” (12) and then says that the largest number of these breadwinners were young females. This shows that the young women are working intensively and are the income of their families. Also, in the previously stated quote (“Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.
Thatcher, Laurel. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. 1st. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. 1-142 . Print.
In her book, First Generations Women in Colonial America, Carol Berkin depicts the everyday lives of women living during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Berkin relays accounts of European, Native American, and African women's struggles and achievements within the patriarchal colonies in which women lived and interacted with. Until the first publication of First Generations little was published about the lives of women in the early colonies. This could be explained by a problem that Berkin frequently ran into, as a result of the patriarchal family dynamic women often did not receive a formally educated and subsequently could not write down stories from day to day lives. This caused Berkin to draw conclusions from public accounts and the journals of men during the time period. PUT THESIS HERE! ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THE BOOK.
Mary Wollstonecraft lived with a violet and abusive father which led her to taking care of her mom and sister at an early age. Fanny Blood played an important role in her life to opening her to new ideas of how she actually sees things. Mary opened a school with her sister Eliza and their friend Fanny Blood. Back then for them being a teacher made them earn a living during that time, this made her determined to not rely on men again. Mary felt as if having a job where she gets paid for doing something that back then was considered respected than she wouldn’t need a man to be giving her money. She wasn’t only a women’s right activist but she was a scholar, educator and journalist which led her to writing books about women’s rights.
In the text, one learns of how bags, or toe-sacks as I have always heard, were turned into bed linens, bath linens, undergarments, cookware, and dresses. The fact that women were smart enough to re-use feed bags for necessary household and personal care says a lot about the southern farm-women’s mind. They are already supporting peddlers, making their own money to become economically stable, and now they are making their own beautiful linens. One story of this wonderful invention comes from north Georgia’s Harriet Echols who says “I’d try to go buy feed so I could match the bags with what I had at home… I’d take a bag of every color that I had.” Later in the nineteenth century, cotton bags became a more popular source of bags. Cotton bag clothes were given to those who were not economically stable yet to help in times of need. The Georgia Emergency Relief Administration was one of the most successful relief projects and were “classes for young girls who longed for pretty things but could not afford to buy them and could not make them.” Southern farm women gained much attention for the way that they thought of things; for thinking up the idea of sewing feed sacks to make high-demand linens. Here we are in late 2016, still using the ideology based off of sewing feed sacks. Not only was this idea very unique, but it was also beneficial. This was another clever way in which women found to excel in the economy. If they were only sewing for themselves or their family, they did not lose money because they were using recycled products and in the grand scheme of things were making clothes basically at no cost. If they were selling their linens to others who maybe had no interest or time in sewing, they were using recycled sacks and could have sold their linens so they were actually gaining profit. By these women re-using feed sacks,
Many of us complain about the tough hours we work or the amount of chores we have to complete, but think about the truly harsh conditions that young girls and women had to work in the textile industry with very little pay and no accolades. Back in the 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution struck, it made it hard for female mill workers to enjoy being employed. Due to the terrible working conditions, the amount of hours worked, and the low wages were a few of the similarities that the female mill workers in England and Japan shared.
Industrialization had a major impact on the lives of every American, including women. Before the era of industrialization, around the 1790's, a typical home scene depicted women carding and spinning while the man in the family weaves (Doc F). One statistic shows that men dominated women in the factory work, while women took over teaching and domestic services (Doc G). This information all relates to the changes in women because they were being discriminated against and given children's work while the men worked in factories all day. Women wanted to be given an equal chance, just as the men had been given.
Although Martha did have different jobs to do, her real job was being a midwife. She got paid high for a woman at this time and she was a well respected person in the town. This job was the most demanding and it?s not like...
Kelley, Mary. Introduction. The Power of Her Sympathy. By Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993.
The "Autobiography". Abrams 1601 - 1604. Mulock, Dinah. Maria. A Woman's Thoughts About Women.