Dialogue

Long before I finally met Laurel, I felt I knew her, from my close and repeated encounters teaching Good Wives, her first book, in my women's history lecture course at University of California, Santa Barbara. Far more than most history monographs, Good Wives resounded with the personal voice of its author. Laurel managed to convey her historical sensibilities and to display her reasoning process, sharing with readers her observations and showing how she drew conclusions from her evidence. It was a great book to teach, in part because it adhered closely to the thematic structure of my course, but also because it so elegantly modeled a historian at work, busily deriving meaning from evidence. I explicitly made it an examplar for my students year after year by handing them a court case from Essex County (Mass.) with the assignment: "Do a Laurel-Ulrich-style analysis of this, milking it for all nuance and meaning." My point is, well before A Midwife's Tale appeared, I was a big fan of Laurel's; in fact, I wrote her an out-of-the-blue fan letter, something I had never done before, and, I think, not since.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, while working at an East coast archive, I encountered an unfamiliar historian from the generation once removed from my own, and we shared a casual lunch. As so often happens, we established a footing for our conversation by reviewing people we knew in common. When Laurel Ulrich's name came up, I wondered what she was working on for her second book project. He replied somewhat dismissively: "I hear she is involved with some midwife from Maine, and to tell you the truth, I hope she'll wrap that up and get back to doing real history soon." The Pulitzer, Bancroft, Joan Kelly, and John Dunning Book Prizes later, not to mention the film, the website, and continued high volume sales both in classroom assignment and popular reading—this dismissal of course sounds totally misplaced and even ludicrous now. But that is hindsight; from the vantage point of traditional history in the mid-1980s, it was really not so clear that the life of Martha Ballard could sustain a whole book.

It is not hard to spin out the reasons why a critic at that time might think Ballard an undertaking not worthy of a decade's worth of research. A project on an unknown midwife from Maine risked being "not real history" on several counts. First, it was not about a famous person, someone who "mattered." In this frame of reference, a book on Ephraim Ballard would be just as problematic as one on his wife Martha. Second, a project on a midwife promised a focus on the mysterious gynecological workings of women's bodies, a subject that no doubt many men both of Martha Ballard's day, and of the 1980s as well, preferred to leave shrouded in mystery. Women have babies—where's the history in that repetitive biological process? Third, it was a book that took place in Maine, both the geographical and historiographical margin of early American history. Did Maine really matter to the grand narrative of American history in the age of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson? Maine was not mainstream.

I actually do not remember who this dismissive critic was at that otherwise memorable lunch that day. I retell his comment, not to embarrass him, but to recall to all our minds where a central part of the profession was, as recently as the mid-1980s, in its evaluation of what constituted "real history." I am quite sure he was not discrediting the general enterprise of women's history, then two decades old and solidly accepted as an important part of social and cultural history. Laurel's Good Wives book, along with many others, had convincingly mapped out the terrain of the gender system in early America. But the triumph of a book entirely focused on an obscure Maine midwife named...