Martha Moore Ballard (1734/1735 - 1812) was an American midwife, healer, and diarist.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/midwife/index.html

Life

Ballard was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, to Elijah Moore and Dorothy Learned Moore and married Ephraim Ballard in 1754. The couple had nine children between 1756 and 1779 and lost three of them to a diphtheria epidemic in Oxford in the summer of 1769. Ballard's obituary was published on May 31, 1812, in Hallowell/Augusta, Maine.

"The notice of Martha's death in a local paper summed up her life in just one sentence:

"Died in Augusta, Mrs. Martha, consort of Mr. Ephraim Ballard, aged 77 years."

Without the diary we would know nothing of her life after the last of her children was born, nothing of the 816 deliveries she performed between 1785 and 1812. We would not even be certain she had been a midwife."

Ballard was related to Clara Barton, known for her Civil War work and founder of the American Red Cross. Clara was the granddaughter of Ballard's sister, Dorothy Barton.

Her Diary

Between 1785 and 1812, Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work and domestic life in Hallowell on the Kennebec River, District of Maine. The sometimes cryptic log of daily events, written with a quill pen and homemade ink, records numerous babies delivered and illnesses treated as she traveled by horse or canoe around the Massachusetts frontier in what is today the state of Maine. Her writing also illustrates struggles and tragedies within her own family, local crimes and scandals, and provides a woman's perspective on political events then unfolding in the nascent years of the early American republic. Other aspects of society in the late 18th century and early 19th century, including daily activities, medical practices, religious squabbles and sexual mores, add color to Ballard's account.

Ballard used her diary as an accounting book and to keep records of her medical practice. For 27 years, she wrote in it every day. There were a total of 9,965 entries. Many of her early records were short and choppy, but her later entries became longer and detailed. One includes the comment that children in New England were allowed to choose their romantic interest as long as they were in the same economic class, something which was rare at that time.

She always started her entries with the weather, and then the time. For example, from an entry in Martha Ballard’s diary, she wrote “May 11, 1797 it is now 11h Evn, my family have been in bed 2 hours". Her very last diary entry states, “made a prayer adapted to you case.” The diary was kept in her family, eventually coming into the care of her great-great-granddaughter, Mary Hobart, one of America’s first female physicians who graduated from the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1884, the same year that she received the diary. Hobart was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Society. In 1930, Hobart donated the diary to the Maine State Library in Augusta.

A Midwife's Tale

For many years historians ignored Martha Ballard's diary, dismissed as repetitive and ordinary. After eight years of research, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich produced A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812:

"When I finally was able to connect Martha's work to her world, I could begin to create stories."

Ulrich's history is an intimate and densely imagined portrait of the industrious and reticent Martha Ballard, and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, and the nature of marriage and sexual relations. Each chapter in A Midwife's Tale represents one aspect of the life of a woman in the late 18th Century. The overriding theme is the nature of women's work at that time, in the context and community. Supporting documents construct Ulrich's interpretation of terse and circumspect diary entries, dealing with medical practice and the prevalence of violence and crime.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is known for her books on early New England, but she is not a native of the region. She grew up among the potato farms and sagebrush of eastern Idaho in a town that was on the main highway to Yellowstone National Park. On clear days, which were common, you could see the Grand Tetons in the distance. Her western upbringing accounts for her Rocky Mountain accent and for her fascination with the way New England history came to dominate national culture. She remembers in second grade sitting cross-legged in a pseudo-Indian costume reciting lines from Longfellow’s Hiawatha, and she remembers driving through the lava-filled moonscape of southern Idaho singing “Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House We Go.”  She came to New England in 1960 with her husband, Gael Ulrich, who completed an Sc.D. in Chemical Engineering at MIT. She completed her own graduate work at the University of New Hampshire while raising her five children. She came to Harvard in 1995 and now lives in Cambridge.