MIDWIFERY AND WOMEN'S WORK IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC: A RECONSIDERATION OF LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH'S A MIDWIFE'S TALE


Tunc T. E.

HISTORICAL JOURNAL, cilt.53, sa.2, ss.423-428, 2010 (AHCI) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Derleme
  • Cilt numarası: 53 Sayı: 2
  • Basım Tarihi: 2010
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1017/s0018246x10000105
  • Dergi Adı: HISTORICAL JOURNAL
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.423-428
  • Hacettepe Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Twenty years after as initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning monograph A midwife's talc: the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785-1812 (1990) still stoves as a major benchmark in women's labour/economic history mainly because it provides scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself While, on the surface, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich notes, 'it is in the very dailiness, the Mutative, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies... For her, living was to be measured in doing' (p. 9). By piecing together 'ordinary' primary source material to,form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important: by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783-1848). Even though A midwife's tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine); it deserves the renewed attention of historians - especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labour, and women's work before industrialization.