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Journal of Women's History 14.3 (2002) 148-157



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Dialogue

Marla R. Miller


A couple of weeks ago, I got to visit one of my very good friends from graduate school, and I was telling her about this panel and its multi-generational aspect. When I said that my job was to represent "younger scholars," she started laughing. 1 So I'm not sure just what "generation" it is that I represent, but I was in my second year of graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, when A Midwife's Tale came out, and trying to reconstruct where my thinking was before and then after I read the book has been an exercise in making history out of memory, and sometimes dim memories at that. As in all such enterprises, there's a good chance that I am imposing order in retrospect that was not there at the time. But at the time that I first encountered this work, I had no sense of paradigms shifting; the books I was reading in those years introduced me to the prevailing paradigms. For those of us who entered graduate school at about the time A Midwife's Tale appeared, the book reflected changes that had been brewing since the 1960s, a coming of age for both social history and women's history.

The best evidence for that observation might be a 1993 Journal of American History (JAH) survey that asked more than 1000 readers which historical monographs they most admired. 2 Respondents offered more than 1200 titles, reflecting the scholarly energy and broad interests of our discipline, but eleven books rose to the top. Knowing what we now do about A Midwife's Tale's impact, it may seem unsurprising that the book would appear on that list—but what is striking is that all of the other top-eleven titles were published between 1951 and 1975, the most recent being Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. A Midwife's Tale—the only title on the list authored by a woman, and the only work of women's history on the list—achieved this status after just two years in circulation, an accomplishment that reflects the book's ability to speak to the several generations of historians who fell within the survey's scope.

I think the book's presence on the JAH survey, its apparently immediate appeal, has to do with three problems that I remember historians grappling with in those years. First, among women's historians, a good deal of our scholarly conversation back then turned on the prevailing and problematic "spheres" paradigm. The year before I entered graduate school, Linda Kerber had published her important JAH article suggesting [End Page 148] that the use of the term "separate spheres" had recently entered its "third stage," in which historians had begun to explore "how women's allegedly 'separate sphere' was affected by what men did, and how activities defined by women in their own sphere influenced and even set constraints and limitations on what men might choose to do." 3 Social historians were in a particularly good position to test the specific properties of these metaphorical spheres as they operated in the world; Laurel's work in particular helped historians reconceptualize the ways in which spheres functioned when they were inhabited by individual men and women. As Mary noted, surely one of the most enduring and influential images from A Midwife's Tale is the blue-and-white checked cloth that Laurel invokes to explain the ways in which the economic worlds of women and men were at once separated from, but intersected with, one another. Her study of Ephraim and Martha Ballard's Hallowell illuminated not simply women's lives or men's, but social relations between and among men and women, in communities shaped by both constraints and opportunities.

Meanwhile (and this is the second dilemma I recall from these years), those historians whose careers spanned the advent of the new social history were worried about the fragmentation that seemed an inevitable consequence of a methodology that...

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