In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Women's History 14.3 (2002) 133-139



[Access article in PDF]

Dialogue

Paradigm Shift Books:
A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Mary Maples Dunn


It gives me great pleasure to discuss—celebrate—the work of Laurel Ulrich, a friend and colleague. When Helen Horowitz arranged this panel, she anticipated some generational differences in our approaches to A Midwife's Tale 1perhaps drawing on the experience she and I had teaching the book together. To tease this out, each of us will "position" herself in respect to Laurel and her work. I begin, perhaps because I am the oldest, and have known Laurel the longest, having been the outside examiner in her dissertation defense. Her director was Darrett Rutman, a friend of mine, who knew I was doing some work in the history of women, and he wanted that expertise at the exam. 2 I think he was also very proud of Laurel's work and wanted to show it off to someone who might talk about it among other historians of women. The dissertation became Good Wives, and needless to say, the examiners urged the author to take it immediately to press. 3

So I am on this panel, and as a historian, a generation older than Laurel, who is in turn a generation older than Pat, and so on. And although Helen thought of the generational difference in respect to the reception of A Midwife's Tale, the generational context within which Laurel wrote it is also important historiographically. I am reminded of an occasion a few years ago when female graduate students in history at Harvard invited Laurel and me to meet with them and talk about how it was that we entered the profession. It was a slightly topsy-turvy pair of accounts since I was the older one and a member of the 1950s generation who had nevertheless gone straight into graduate school and then into teaching; Laurel, younger, had married as soon as she graduated from university, and began to raise a blossoming family. She said that as she pushed a stroller through Harvard Square, she realized that although her life was very full and happy, there was nevertheless something missing, something, we might say, to nourish further the mind and spirit. She began taking courses in literature and earned a master's degree in English at Simmons (an interest that might account for her great sensitivity to language, and her skill as a writer, and perhaps for the way Anne Bradstreet seems to have inspired her), collaborated on a book called Boston for Beginners, first published [End Page 133] in 1967, but finally turned to history. 4 She received her Ph. D. from New Hampshire in 1980, and published Good Wives in 1982. There are, I think, a number of links between her dissertation and her own life (that might seem obvious to us now) and to the state of colonial American history at the time. Let me concentrate on the latter—at least as I remember it.

American colonial history underwent its own paradigm shift (although I do not think any of us called it that) in the late 1960s and 1970s, as historians (particularly historians of New England) turned away from the political and intellectual history that had long been dominant. Influenced—indeed stimulated and galvanized—by the French sixteenth section, English demographers, and such historians as Peter Laslett, Philippe Aries, Leroy Ladurie, and Pierre Goubert, young colonialists (and indeed some senior colonialists such as Darret Rutman) began to mine previously ignored materials—church records, probate records, tax records, census returns, and business accounts. Four books published in 1970 (just about when the young Ulrich was thinking seriously about history) were particularly remarkable, and made a collective impact on the profession that may be hard to imagine today. The four were John Demos' A Little Commonwealth, Philip Greven's Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts; Kenneth Lockridge's A New England Town: The First Hundred Years; and Michael Zuckerman's...

pdf

Share