57 pages • 1 hour read
Content Warning: This section of the study guide contains references to child/pregnancy loss, mass murder, and sexual assault.
Religion’s role in everyday life in late-18th-century New England plays an important role in Martha’s diary and Ulrich’s historical analysis. From the Introduction, Martha’s religious faith is clear and her devotion to God evident. Like her neighbors, she was a fastidious and practicing Protestant, a faith that was all but compulsory in her region. Despite the cultural requirement of faith, Martha still had an authentic relationship with her religion, often praying in her diary to God for faith, patience, or a change of heart in those she deemed rude or wicked. During trying times, Martha inadvertently compares herself to Biblical figures, which Ulrich notes: “She, like Job, would endure” (320). In the Bible, Job was at the center of a bet between God and Satan in which Satan bet God that Job would turn away from his faith if God took everything from him. After relentless torment and losing his family, wealth, and health, Job remained faithful to God. In comparing Martha to Job, Ulrich makes a somewhat sarcastic connection with a serious undertone: Martha’s complaints did not match what Job endured, but the impacts of her husband’s imprisonment, the losses she endured, and her own health concerns were not trivial.
Martha’s faith gave her a lens through which to view the world, especially in the wake of tragedy. After the Purrington murders, Martha recorded diary entries about the lessons Christians could take from the event and God’s role in it. Ulrich writes, “The essential point was that God was in control, that he had the power to ‘sanctify’ as well as to destroy” (340). In giving control to God, the community of Hallowell was able to cope with the unexpected “scene” or tear in the social web of normality. An entire family murdered is an event so out of the ordinary that the only way Martha could explain it was the will of God. For something so terrible to happen for no reason would be incomprehensible.
The murders also demonstrated the rising issue of religious pluralism in New England: “It was inevitable that the Purrington murders should feed into the growing anxiety over religious dissent in the region,” Ulrich writes (342). The alleged Universalist motive behind Captain Purrington’s crime was enough for some, including Henry Sewall, who stoked the fires of religious controversy in his repeated legal disagreements and “speaking ill” of Reverend Isaac Foster, to attribute difference in theological belief as the cause of the murders. Religion was so central to the communal identity of Hallowell that any perceived difference in belief—even though still Christian—was interpreted as a threat to the social web.
While Martha’s faith was deeply personal to her and informed her worldview, the religion of the greater community was one of the threads that wove together the social web and defined what it meant to live in Hallowell.
During Martha Ballard’s life, the role of women in society and the economy was very different from the role of men. Economically, men were welcomed within the public sphere and had access to a number of careers. Women, in contrast, were expected to work as housewives and, occasionally, as midwives. Within the realm of the home, women created their own economy via textiles. They worked collaboratively, like the example of Mrs. Savage working to weave with the Ballards. Martha repaid Mrs. Savage with a skein of linen for her trouble. Ulrich writes of this exchange:
The skein of linen […] symbolizes the household production that characterized pre-industrial life, the neighborly trade that made such production possible, and the gender division of labor that assured women a place in economic life (94).
While men loaned each other money and labor, women loaned both labor and the fruits of their labor through a bartering system. In working together, women cemented their place in an economy of their own, separate from and outside of the influence of men.
The social roles of men and women were also separate. In Martha’s diary, she makes notes of men and women coming to visit, but rarely together. For example, women visited with women (Mrs. Savage, Widow Williams, and Mrs. Harris visiting together), and men visited with men (Jonathan Ballard and hired hand Taylor visiting together). Men and women did not work together, nor did they socialize together.
The socioeconomic differences in the community also separated people, especially men. Men rarely socialized with men outside of their class, but women did. Women helped each other, with both work and charity, across various economic classes. Of this, Ulrich writes, “Economic and social differences might divide a community; the unseen acts of women wove it together” (115). Continuing with the metaphor of the social web, Ulrich explains that women were the bridge across social divides. Women visited with women from all different backgrounds. For example, Martha visited with her neighbors Mrs. Savage and Mrs. Harris, but she also made midwifery calls to women known as Black Hitty and Hitty Pierce, two women who experienced ostracization due to their race and for having a child out of wedlock, respectively. In this way, women bridged the gaps present in society in a way men did not, further highlighting the separation between men and women.
The social and medical practices present in Martha’s diary and in Ulrich’s historical research differ among male and female practitioners. Martha was a midwife and had familiarity with the medical knowledge necessary for midwifery and general nursing, learned from practice under another midwife. Male doctors had a more formal education with some degree of medical school, and as such, they “leaned toward dramatic therapies was only to be expected. Their status—and fees—required as much” (70). Midwives had a reputation for reliability, but doctors had an educational background that patients believed, correctly or incorrectly, offered them a different and perhaps higher degree of medical care.
While doctors had a reputation as more educated, midwives and female healers had a separate sphere of influence. Ulrich notes that, during the period in which physicians worked part-time, women took on the “messy” work of healing and care, which both took more time and “validated” the practices of doctors. This division of labor was tenable “As long as both sets of practitioners shared the same basic assumptions, and as long as physicians were content with the income available from part-time practice” (81). The lack of competition between doctors and female healers like Martha was down to the doctors’ part-time work, as they spent their remaining time in politics or other economic pursuits. Ulrich’s description of female work as “messy” also demonstrates how hands-on female healers were in contrast to their male counterparts, who for most of Martha’s career were only called in the case of medical emergencies.
This would begin to change, however, in the later years of Martha’s career in the early 1800s. Martha and Dr. Cony got into a conflict over the treatment of one of her grandchildren, due to Martha offering her opinion on Cony’s course of treatment. Ulrich examines the incident through the lens of Martha’s power, which Cony perceived as a threat to his own, concluding that the conflict “shows the doctor’s willingness to assert his authority against the claims of a presumably inferior practitioner. This was, of course, what the new medical societies were encouraging physicians to do” (295). Societal changes and changes within the field of medicine—such as establishing medicine as a full-time vocation that absorbed the “ordinary” work performed by midwives and nurses—created new tension among doctors and midwives, leading physicians to denigrate them and their reputations. The delicate balance of care was shifting, a shift that would later lead to Mary Hobart attending medical school instead of following her great-grandmother’s example in midwifery. By the end of Martha’s life, the role of the midwife was slowly shrinking, even though she died still practicing her vocation.
The daily life and work of a midwife in colonial and postcolonial America was characterized by unpredictability. Martha delivered dozens of babies a year, but she could never know when they would arrive: day or night, summer or winter. Though it was a difficult role, it offered a symbiotic relationship, as Martha gained not only respect and strength from her patients and their spouses but material goods and assistance: “The fathers who fetched her in the black of night [offered] her the command of their horses and bedchambers, bestowing lumber credits and teapots for her service” (293). Ulrich concludes that the communal nature of her work and the ability to use her skill for nurturing mean that “Martha Ballard needed her patients as much as they needed her” (236). The men who called for Martha, the women who labored under her care, and Martha herself all needed each other, illustrating the essential nature of her role within the community and her vocation—one of the few available outside the home—as a source of personal fulfillment. The imagery utilized by Ulrich—such as “the black of night”—also demonstrates the intense and irregular nature of Martha’s role.
Martha’s work as a midwife was scientific in nature, even if she did not mirror the technical language utilized by male practitioners and medical journals. For instance, Martha watched for signs of “transition” within labor, indicating that the cervix is fully dilated and active labor is beginning. As Ulrich notes, “Martha Ballard explicitly linked a new intensity of labor with the summoning of the neighbors” (215). While Martha did not employ the term “active labor,” she knew how and when to time the engagement of additional help. Furthermore, she counted contractions with her timepiece and checked a patient’s dilation with her fingers, techniques still used in midwifery today. That her maternal-fetal mortality rate was lower than that of doctors who attended medical school as recently as the 1930s suggests that her work was as—if not more—precise than the physicians of her time. What she offered that male doctors did not was extensive experience with obstetrics as well as compassionate care stemming from her own experiences with childbirth and motherhood.
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