Movie Review

From the time Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale (1990) first appeared, it has been hailed as a wonderful example of how biography can be used to examine larger social, cultural, and political issues. That the book won the Bancroft Prize, the Joan Kelly Prize, the John H. Dunning Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for history demonstrated that the book touched not only those of us in the historical profession but also a larger audience that values excellent historical research and engaging writing. Laurie Kahn Leavitt's translation of this scholarship to a visual format has enlarged the audience even further.	1
The format of this documentary blends both the "story" of Martha Ballard's life in the Maine wilderness, with all of its physical hardships amidst the social and political turmoil of the early republic, with a discussion of how modern-day historians piece together and interpret the evidence from the past. Actress Kaiulani Lee plays Martha Ballard, and others act out the parts of the various family members, relatives, and townspeople with whom Martha interacted in the twenty-seven years she lived in what is now Augusta, Maine. With a voice-over by Laurel Ulrich herself, various episodes from the book are reenacted in five- to ten-minute segments. Between each segment, Ulrich is shown either in her study or in the Maine Historical Society library, examining pieces of the diary and other evidence. Ulrich states that the diary itself had been known to historians for many years in an excerpted version and explains how she pieced together the daily entries, with their seemingly inconsequential details, to arrive at important conclusions about the political, social, and cultural lives of women in the early republic. She emphasizes how painstaking this research can be—we see her notes and the elaborate charts needed to determine the relationships among the women and men of Martha's village. Thus, the film's reenactments nicely illustrate how and, more important, why social historians have focused on the lives of ordinary people to understand the complexities of the past.	2
Martha Ballard was a midwife, and the film spends a significant amount of time discussing this part of her life. We see several scenes of childbirth, with Martha in attendance, clearly directing the other women assisting at the birth. In addition, midwives were involved in the "welfare" of the community, especially in helping to prosecute bastardy cases, and thus we also see Martha interrogating a woman at the height of her labor, asking her the name of the father. In a wonderfully ironic twist, the father is Martha's own son, Jonathan Ballard. Like many midwives, Martha was also called upon to perform other medical duties, and the film graphically shows her taking care of very sick babies and children during a scarlet fever epidemic. As Martha lays out the dead, Ulrich's voice-over discusses Martha's diary entries from that period, which were uncharacteristically emotional. As we learn, Martha had lost several of her own children years before during a similar epidemic, and we come to understand the intimate connections that people in the past made between birth and death.	3
However, as the film shows, all of Martha's many midwifery duties were being challenged by physicians in the early nineteenth century. Possessing instruments and drugs that Martha did not use, young physicians were being called by well-to-do women who hoped that the "science" claimed by these doctors might ensure a safer childbirth. The film depicts Martha's response, which was to try to work with some of the physicians in the community and even to learn some of their "science"—we see her attending the autopsy of her niece, who died shortly after her marriage. But midwifery offered more than just attendance at the actual delivery, and many townswomen continued to value her skills, so that Martha practiced her occupation even into her old age.	4
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