DATE: January 22, 1998

 Database: 9900014

 Subject: . Discussions Topics .
 

Structure:

1. Takes task familar to most women of the time (using terms of the period) to describe the social
framework to modern readers.

"Where white thread crossed white thread, the squares would be uncolored, where blue crossed
blue the squares would be a deep indigo, where white crossed blue or blue crossed white the result
would be a lighter, mixed tone, the whole forming the familiar pattern of plain woven "check" even
today.  Think of the white threads as women's activities, the blue as men's, then imagine the resulting
social web." (75)
 

2. For Ulrich there is no prismatic event through which to view Martha Ballard's life but rather a
culmination of experiences across time and place.

Ulrich asks rhetorically: "Where is the center of the picture"..."There is no center, only a kind of grid,
faint trails of experience converging and deflecting across a single day" (183)
 

Method:

Ulrich method attempts to span Martha Ballard's life from 1785 to 1812 by juxtaposing diary entries
with her analysis.  Each chapter begins one month and at least one year from the previous entry
(from August 1787 to May 1809). The result is that A Midwife's Tale comes almost full circle
through the seasons of Martha Ballard's life. Ulrich portrays her life as neither static nor safe.

"Someday the diary may be published. What follows is in no sense a substititute for it; it is an
interpretation, a kind of exegis. Based upon a close reading of the manuscript and of supporting
records, it attempts to open out Martha's book for the twentieth-century reader.  The diary does not
stand alone.  A serious reading requires research in a wide range of sources" (34)

"Juxtaposing the raw diary and the interpretive essay in this way, I have hoped to remind readers of
the complexity and subjectivity if historical reconstruction, to give them some sense of both affinity
and the distance between history and source"

"The first half of Martha's diary, written when her family's productive power was at its height,
portrays a self-confident and vigorous woman managing a household, acting autonomously and
trading with her neighbors.  The second half shows how illness, fatigue, and an unlucky move could
shatter a world, expose a woman's dependence, and force her to lean on the uncertain arm of family
affection".

Book makes the claim that women's history not exclusive and questions the universality of political
and economic: "Martha's web included both kinds of thread, indigo and white. In contrast, Henry
Sewall reported 184 encounters with 115 persons, only thirteen of whom were
women...Surprisingly, even when households rather than individuals are the measure, Matha's diary
is more comprehensive than the men's" (92-93)

"Henry Sewall inhabitaed a world of opposites- of litigation and Grace, of courts and prayer circles,
of precise penmanship and religious rapture.  THe two institutions that dominated his thinking, the
court and the church, had one thing in common: they were both ritualized strucutres set apart from
everyday life. And in both he was the Elect. Henry's world was ostensiensibly larger than Martha's.
He traveled farther, read more, wrote more, and by any account left a larger imprint on the affairs of
state and town.  Yet when her diary is used as the measure, his life seems small.  He leaped from
indigo square to indigo square, from courtroom to town meeting to the getherings of saints, with little
awareness of the finespun fibers between.  Despite his conflicts and losses, his was a remarkable
safe world, a world in which most questions had answers, events had beginnings and ends, and
problems could be categorized if not resolved.  Matha's world was a web without a selvage, a
shuttle perpetually in motion" (111)
 
 

Consequences to my own project:

1. Need to reevaluate the importance of the Revolution on Isabella Clark's life.  Did I portray it as a
prismatic event. How can refine it but still include what I see as relative consequences such as the
creation of the capital itself.

2.  Ulrich writes: "The diary makes quite clear that men did monpolize public business, that
households, were formally patriarchal, and that women did uncritically assume that houses and even
babies belonged to men...Yet it also shows a complex web of social and economic exchange that
engaged women beyond the household.  Women in eighteenth century Hallowell had no political life
but they did have a community life.  THe base of that community life was a gender division of labor
that gave them responsibility for particualr tasks, products, and forms of trade" (76)

I need to think about how this changes in Washington DC; how women's social relationships provide
the foundation for politics (SEE GLENDA GILMORE's Gender and Jim Crow which discusses
African American women's political participation and their impact on  in North Carolina before the
right to vote ECP/ 99/ 1//