Personal History: Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the Scholarly Guise in Early American Women's Studies

Abstract

A familiar with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s prizewinning study A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785– 1812 might be forgiven for taking the “two lives” she refers to above as her own and Goody Ballard’s.1 As this prominent historian of early American women would be the first to admit, she practically becomes Ballard in this book.2 Excerpts from the midwife’s diary, elliptical and untouched, constitute the first few pages of every chapter, ten in all. Each is modestly adorned with a few words culled from that excerpt to form the title: “warpt a piece,” “A Desection Performed.” If the data of the text are the flour, sugar, cloth, and hardware sailing up the Kennebec River and into its first paragraph, the book is the river itself, “calm and blue” at the close of the introduction (3, 35). A Midwife’s Tale represents nothing less than one exceptional scholar’s uncanny reenactment of a previously unremembered woman’s exemplary and idiosyncratic life— and through it, her rich historical moment. It may come as a surprise, then, that Ulrich did not have Ballard in mind when she claimed to have led “two lives.” Rather, both belong to her alone. Here is the passage in full: “As a writer, I have led two lives. In my guise as a historian, I have published carefully documented books and essays about seventeenthand eighteenthcentury America, using the first person singular only in prefaces. But over the same span of years, I have had a second, less visible life as a personal essayist” (“Pail of Cream” 43). In this essay I argue that the two beings Ulrich identifies— the “guise” and the “life”— are in an important sense one. For as is