Life of Martha Ballard

Historians have been dimly cognisant of this broad-based work, yet they have had difficulty defining it. [Male] physicians who joined aesculapian societies and adopted an occupational gloss can be accept as professionals But what shall we call the women? (61).

Ulrich considers such titles as house servant medicine, folk medicine, popular medicine, and lay medicine, settling finally on fond medicine because it de nones the close though in ground levelal ties between the women healers and their comm adept. While male physicians sought to avail themselves of every title and designation which would distance themselves from the community---achieving a superior, professional position all over it---women healers were such an inherent part of the community that they have been scarce noticed by historians: "Social healers . . . were so closely identify with their public we can hardly find them" (61). The healers administered medical conduct in a number of ways, especially in the form of midwifery: "A midwife was the most visible and go through person in a community of healers who shared her perspective, her obligations, her training, and her elbow grease" (64).

However, she had no degrees on the wall, no titles, nothing like the income of a male physician, and therefore she has not been given her proper ascribable in the historical records of a society which was so exhaustively defined and operated by powerful men. This exclusion of women from the circle of recogn

Thus was a Catch-22 for midwifes presented: "Women could not determine themselves to trust midwifery without mastering general medicine, but tuition general medicine would disqualify them as women and therefore as midwives" (251).

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale. New York: Vintage, 1990.

women should no longer be employed as midwives because their character would be destroyed by acquaintance with the dissections essential to thorough instruction in medicine. . . . "I venture to say that a womanish could scarce run short through the course of education requisite to prepare her . . . for the practice of midwifery, without destroying those moral qualities of character, which are essential to the office" (251).

ized power in medicine was taken to great lengths by male physicians. We put down of one professor of medicine who argued that

At the same time, it is just as clear from the evidence presented in the diary that the roles of women were ill limited by social convention. They could not be doctors. They could not control the economical activity of the household or the town. They could lend greatly, but only in the categories prescribed by social convention, that is, by men.

To the contrary, with respect to the most down-to-earth execution of economic matters, Ballard's diary

records not only when Ephraim Ballard planted the flax, but when she and her daughters weeded and harvested it. It . . . identifies . . . the many female neighbors who assisted her and her daughters with the combing, spinning, reeling, boiling, spooling, warping, quilling, weaving, bucking, and bleaching that transformed the ripe plant into finished cloth. Martha's diary fills in the missing work---and trade---of women (29).

Ulrich refers to "an economy characterized by family production" (75). The unity and harmony of the community was advanced by the work of women in that economy. Ballard "not only employed her daughters . . . and her nieces, . . . but
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