Dialogue

Since authors are probably the least trustworthy commentators on their own works, I am grateful to Mary Dunn, Pat Cohen, and Marla Miller, not only for their generous praise, but also for helping me understand the surprising success of A Midwife's Tale. I admit to having had high ambitions as I worked on that book. I very much wanted to produce something that would be acceptable to scholars and at the same time accessible to general readers. As I completed the manuscript, I was certain I had failed. I could not imagine why anyone would want to follow me through my obsessive investigations into what was admittedly a dry and taciturn text. Martha's story engaged me, but I was not at all sure that it would interest anybody else, except perhaps my engineer husband, who, having fallen asleep while reading early drafts of the manuscript put down the umpteenth revision and said, "This is going to win a prize."

Most of the time I give the credit for the book's success to Martha and her remarkable life. In some sense, she was Everywoman. She was a housewife and a midwife, a working woman and a mother, a counter of beans and turkeys, and a witness to murder, frontier war, sexual violence, and despair. The fan mail I have received over the years tells me that some readers identify with her gentle qualities, others with her iconoclasm. Mostly, I think, people are fascinated to discover seemingly timeless human dilemmas in the diary of an eighteenth-century woman. I once had a phone call from a male reader, a professional historian, who wanted to talk with me about Martha's relationship with her son. He was apparently having a bit of trouble with his own mother. On another occasion, at the invitation of a neighbor, I sat in a roomful of mothers and daughters, all of whom had read the book. The mothers, who had stayed at home to raise their children, were entranced by Martha's career. The daughters, all young professionals, were intrigued by her homemaking achievements. She is a compelling heroine because she answers so many fantasies.

Mary, Pat, and Marla remind us, however, that books, like people, are shaped by their times. They point to the author's training at the University of New Hampshire where one of her mentors was a pioneering practitioner and theorist in the then-emerging field of community studies. They note the flourishing of women's history during the same period. And they are quite correct in noting that by the time A Midwife's Tale was published, both social history and women's history were undergoing new strains and stresses. Women's historians were not only questioning the notion of separate spheres but also exposing divisions among women, while historians of all persuasions were arguing about fragmentation and wondering how to overcome it. In short, A Midwife's Tale was not only a product of its time, but, by some stroke of fate, it also answered some of the yearnings and issues of the moment.

I am impressed with all that Mary, Pat, and Marla have been able to discover about the genesis and responses to my book. Since I am persuaded by their arguments, I would like simply to add a few biographical details that they could not have known about because their sources—my books, published reviews, the film, and our personal encounters—did not reveal them. While it is surely true that my work grows out of my own life experience (Mary is right about my reflections while pushing a stroller through Harvard Yard), it also grows out of deeper historical roots. I did not understand this myself until I was confronted by Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, the gifted filmmaker who produced the documentary on the book.

For five years, Laurie probed my research notes and my psyche. She not only wanted to celebrate my work, but she also wanted to figure out where it came...