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

As a writer, I have led two lives.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Pail of Cream” (2002)

Anyone familiar with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s prize-winning 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 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 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 true of any lastingly significant scholarship, this author’s first-person-free academic prose is rich with self-investment. As such, her personal essays—most of them centered on her experiences as a Mormon feminist, as she is used to being labeled by acquaintances, some of whom consider the term an oxymoron—help us reread her academic work so as both to tease out and begin to resolve its productively “oxymoronic” nature. For Ulrich this term indicates “a rhetorical figure in which contradictory or incongruous terms are intentionally joined in order to complicate or enlarge meaning” (“Border Crossings” 1, 5).

I attempt this joining not to call out Ulrich herself but to help us better understand Ballard and, in the process, our own ways of conducting scholarship. For in the model of Ulrich’s classic, the study of early American women’s writing both betrays and benefits from attachments it often expressly eschews. Whether—like Ulrich, her colleague Jill Lepore, and others working in two or more distinct publication arenas—we are able to narrate those attachments in separate documents or whether—like Ulrich’s fellow early Americanist and Mormon feminist Joanna Brooks—we refer to what Robert Fanuzzi would call the “relevance” of our experiences in the scholarship itself, it is crucial that we become increasingly self-aware regarding our choices.³ By means of this case study, then, I hope to encourage readers to question the degree to which, and to what effect, we too screen the “less visible life” behind a scholarly “guise.”

It might be asked why the study of early American women’s writing in particular demands such an approach. The answer is not so much because this field of study is unique as because it is emblematic. We will see below in Ulrich’s case that female academics who study early American women continue to face particular challenges that affect their willingness to write about themselves in their scholarship (among those who engage in this study, I here include both historians and literary scholars who work with texts written by early women). And they have not been shy about discussing these obstacles. As Lepore points out regarding women...