Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Quotes

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.

To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.

Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make a history when someone notices.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and professor, studied the diary and wrote the definitive biography of a woman who should have vanished from history. If not for one diary and the power of words.

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.

Las mujeres que se portan bien no suelen hacer historia.

Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when they create and preserve records and when later generations care.

Most well-behaved women are too busy living their lives to think about recording what they do and too modest about their own achievements to think anybody else will care.

But like other well-behaved women they chose to obey God rather than men.

If well-behaved women seldom make history, it is not only because gender norms have constrained the range of female activity but because history hasn't been very good at capturing the lives of those whose contributions have been local and domestic. For centuries, women have sustained local communities, raising food, caring for the sick, and picking up the pieces after wars.

Well behaved women seldom make history.

Women, to use a Biblical metaphor, performed their works under a bushel; men’s candles burned on the hill.

Everything in arms. Did not find time to sit down till 2 pm.” The phrase is idiomatic, of course, yet it suggests an attitude. A house could be an adversary. Turn your back, and it rippled into disorder. Chairs tipped. Candles slumped. Egg yolks hardened in cold skillets. Dust settled like snow. Only by constant effort could a woman conquer her possessions. Mustering grease and ashes, shaking feather beds and pillows to attention, scrubbing floors and linens into subjection, she restored a fragile order to a fallen world.

Some people are happy to give feminists credit for things they fear—like abortion rights, contraception for teenagers, or gay liberation—but less willing to acknowledge that feminist activism brought about things they support, like better treatment for breast cancer or the opportunity for young girls to play soccer as well as lead cheers. As Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon observe, "Although the word 'feminist' has become a pejorative term for to some American women, most women (and most men as well) support a feminist program: equal education, equal pay, child care, freedom from harassment and violence," and so on.

How long God will preserve my strength to perform as I have done of late he only knows. May I trust in him at all times and do good and hee will fullfill his promis according to my Day. May he giv me strength and may I Conduct accordingly.

Without the diary we would know nothing of her life after the last of her children was born, nothing of the 816 deliveries she performed between 1785 and 1812. We would not even be certain she had been a midwife. In the spring of 1789, Martha faced a flooding river and a rising tide of births. She attended seven deliveries in March and another seven before the end of April, twice her monthly average. On April 23 she went down the Kennebec to visit several families on the west side of the river opposite Bumberhook. This is how she told

In a signed affidavit, William Law affirmed that Hyrum Smith had read to him a revelation “so called” that authorized certain men to have more than one wife. Jane Law added her own statement, explaining that the purported revelation “set forth that those women who would not allow their husbands to have more wives than one should be under condemnation before God.” Their statements were powerful because they were simple, straightforward, and true.

Well-behaved women seldom make history. —Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

We have some of the meanest spirits among us on earth. The net has halled in good and bad,

Les femmes bien élevées entrent rarement dans l'histoire

Three years later, my mother bought a page in the back of the yearbook, as was customary for graduating seniors. On it, she put funny baby photos and well wishes, but tucked inconspicuously throughout the page were little quotes from Mark Twain about the absurdity of uniforms and the danger of blind obedience, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famous “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” My mother’s final parting jab.

historiadora Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, «las mujeres que se portan bien casi nunca hacen historia».

Mary Vial Holyoke was the daughter of a Boston merchant and the wife of a Salem gentleman, Edward Augustus Holyoke, a casual versifier and serious physician who was a member of the town’s economic and intellectual elite.3 The Holyokes enjoyed the barbecues, dances, teas, and “turtles” of the Essex County gentry, yet each of the four major housekeeping roles is clearly apparent in Mary’s diary, as this selection of entries from the 1760s shows: Service and maintenance: “Washed.” “Ironed.” “Scoured pewter.” “Scowered rooms.” “Scoured furniture Brasses & put up the Chintz bed & hung pictures.” “Burnt 5 Chimnies.” “Opened cask of Biscuit.” “Began a Barrel of flour.” “Began upon 22 lb. of chocolate.” “Dressed a Calves Head turtle fashion.” Agriculture: “Sowd sweet marjoram.” “Sowed pease.

[She] was a true light upon a hill. She was a person of humility, affability, compassion and on whose tongue was the law of kindness. Her ear was open to the complaints of the afflicted, and her hand was open for the supply of the needy. If others were so unhappy as to divide into parties and to burn with contention, yet she remained a common friend to all. She was...ready to minister to them to the utmost of her power.

According to Ellen Rothman, even in the early nineteenth century wedding rituals affirmed ties of community. A week of neighborly visiting following the wedding was more common than a journey, and when couples did take a trip, other people often went along. This practice began to change in the second half of the nineteenth century. “Beginning in the 1870s, etiquette books advocated that the couple leave the church—where middle-class weddings increasingly took place—together and alone, and that instead of the ‘harassing bridal tour,’ they enjoy ‘a honeymoon of repose, exempted from claims of society,’ ” By the 1880s, “honeymoon trips to ‘romantic’ locations were expected to follow weddings.” 8

The prosecutorial double standard originated in a 1668 Massachusetts law that introduced the English practice of asking unwed mothers to name the father of their child during delivery. At first glance, questioning a woman in labor seems a form of harassment. In practice, it was a formality allowing the woman, her relatives, or in some cases the selectmen of her town to claim child support. The man she accused could not be convicted of fornication (confession or witnesses were needed for that), but unless there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he would be judged the “reputed father” of her child and required to pay for its support. The assumption was that a woman asked to testify at the height of travail would not lie.

Eighteenth-century households were workshops. Mothers engaged in soapmaking, weaving, candle-dipping, slaughtering, and endless sewing relied on older children to care for their littlest siblings. 10

One might conclude from such a record that Kennebec women had no role in economic life beyond their own households. An intriguing page at the very end of the account book lists flaxseed sold by the Kennebec Agricultural Society, yet there is little evidence in the account book itself of any sort of textile production in the town. Martha’s diary tells us what happened to the seed. It not only records when Ephraim Ballard planted the flax, but when she and her daughters weeded and harvested it. It not only identifies the male helpers who turned and broke it, but 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. 55 Martha’s diary fills in the missing work—and trade—of women.

The diary does not stand alone. A serious reading requires research in a wide range of sources, from Sewall’s diary to Ephraim Ballard’s maps. Wills, tax lists, deeds, court records, and town-meeting minutes provide additional documentation, as do medical treatises, novels, religious tracts, and the fragmentary papers of Maine physicians. But the diary itself is central.

There is no need to sentimentalize this “female world of love and ritual,” to use Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s now famous phrase, 69 to understand that birth, illness, and death wove Hallowell’s female community together.

Only ten men were tried for rape in Massachusetts in the entire eighteenth century, none after 1780. Between 1780 and 1797 there were sixteen indictments and ten convictions for attempted rape, still a small number considering that the population of the state approached 400,000.20 The women’s reticence is hardly surprising, given the rarity of the accusation and the severity of the penalty.

For thirteen of the twenty out-of-wedlock births in the diary, Martha recorded the name of the father, using stylized language that suggests she had indeed “taken testimony” as the law instructed.

In May of 1788, Nathaniel Thwing convicted Joanna of slander after her lover’s father complained that when his son offered to take the child and have it brought up in his house, she had answered, “No, you shall not have it to carry there, for they, meaning your complainant & his wife will murder it, for they have murdered two or three already.” To say that paternity cases were often settled out of court does not mean that they were settled easily or pleasantly. It is merely to argue that the threat of a lawsuit was sometimes as effective as an actual prosecution.

Vaughan was convinced that the new therapies, heroic bloodletting and the use of digitalis, usually in combination with opium, were essential to patient care. To his dismay, he had found a man who preferred the quiet operations of established remedies—and prayer. In Benjamin Vaughan’s mind—and perhaps in Daniel Cony’s as well—the lines were clearly drawn. It was a case of prejudice versus science and of “female” versus “approved” therapies.

Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies.

Both the difficulty and the value of the diary lie in its astonishing steadiness.

Historians sometimes refer to the structure of relations in a community as a “social web.

New England women had long been engaged in barter and trade. The skein of linen warp that Martha gave Mrs. Savage on September 9 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. 6

Men broke flax, sheared sheep, and performed other supportive services (just as they fetched and transported midwives and sat up with their male neighbors), but women had primary responsibility for the production of cloth. As in medicine, elite males connected the Kennebec with the Atlantic, importing finished cloth and raw cotton from Britain and the West Indies, commodities that women transformed into usable products. 7

Spinning, like nursing, was a universal female occupation, a “domestic” duty, integrated into a complex system of neighborly exchange. In both realms, training was communal and cumulative, work was cooperative, even though performed in private households, and the products remained in the local economy. The

The only married woman employed in Martha’s house was Beulah Prince, a free black.

the legal position of unwed mothers in eighteenth-century New England. Massachusetts law had always defined sexual intercourse between unmarried persons as a crime. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, courts had punished men who fathered children out of wedlock as rigorously as the women concerned, often relying on testimony taken from mothers during delivery to establish the fathers’ identity, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, most historians argue, fornication had become a woman’s crime.

There were certainly inequities in the way male and female culpability was defined in this period, yet there is no evidence that in rural communities women who bore children out of wedlock were either ruined or abandoned as early novels would suggest.

William Nelson has shown that while fornication prosecutions still accounted for more than a third of criminal actions in Massachusetts between 1760 and 1774, in only one case was the father of an illegitimate child prosecuted—a black man suspected of cohabiting with a white woman.

For more than twenty-seven years, 9,965 days to be exact, she faithfully kept her record. Martha was not an introspective diarist, yet in this conscientious recording as much as in her occasional confessions, she revealed herself.

Her life had been altered by the Revolution, but her identity was unrelated to the rituals of republicanism. In 1800, she was far more concerned with the death of Nabby Andros, a neighbor’s daughter, than with the demise of General Washington. Her values had been formed in an older world, in which a woman’s worth was measured by her service to God and her neighbors rather than to a nebulous and distant state. For Martha, politics was what men did at town meetings—necessary perhaps, but often troublesome and divisive.

In twentieth-century terms, she was simultaneously a midwife, nurse, physician, mortician, pharmacist, and attentive wife. Furthermore, in the very act of recording her work, she became a keeper of vital records, a chronicler of the medical history of her town.

Some have argued that the American Revolution connected women’s private activities to the public sphere by publicizing their contributions to domestic manufacturing and stimulating a new appreciation of their roles as wives and mothers. Others believe it was women’s activities in voluntary societies in the early nineteenth century that first gave them an identity within and beyond the household. 3

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 particular tasks, products, and forms of trade.

Between 1785 and 1800, thirty-nine young women lived and worked for some period in the Ballard house; almost all were the daughters of local men in the middle range of the town’s tax lists. In contrast to other parts of America, there were no slaves in Hallowell in the late eighteenth century, and few indentured servants. 16

Between 1785 and 1797 Martha delivered 106 women of their first babies. Of these infants, forty, or 38 percent, were conceived out of wedlock. (See Table II.)

Alice Metherell of Kittery, Maine, had been convicted of a false oath in an earlier case of bastardy (she had delivered a black child after accusing a white man), she was able in 1695 to get maintenance from John Thompson and even to defend herself against a slander suit from him.

Much of importance had indeed been omitted from the diary. As we have seen, Nash preserved about a third of the original. He recorded the dramatic journey across the Kennebec in 1789, the passage with which we began this book, most of Martha’s account of the Purrinton murders, and many of her casual references to public affairs. But he provided only an edited version of the births, salvaging genealogical but deliberately excising sexual content. He mentioned autopsies, but excluded her detailed descriptions of them, gave representative samples of her work entries, but cut or muted all references to family troubles. He omitted her description of the North rape trial

For 58 of her 77 years, she was known as “Mrs. Ballard.” Even Benjamin Tappin, the minister who “conversed sweetly” with her just before her death, was unsure of her name. Sometime after 1830, he took it upon himself to correct the early records of Augusta First Church. “It does not appear that any record was made of female members,” he wrote, “but there is sufficient evidence that several females were considered members of the Church. I have taken the liberty, therefore, to add their names.” Beside Ephraim’s name, he wrote “Dorothy Ballard.” 49 James North, Augusta’s nineteenth-century historian, referred to her as “Mrs. Ephraim Ballard” in the body of his work and as “Hannah” in his brief genealogy of the Ballard family. 50 Fortunately, she had the good sense to write firmly at the end of one of her homemade booklets, “Martha Ballard Her Diary.

Martha herself attended 60 percent of the births in Hallowell in the year Cony presented his paper to the Massachusetts Medical Society, and she was not the only female practitioner active at the time. Martha and her peers were not only handling most of the deliveries, they were providing much of the medical care as well. In Martha’s diary, it is doctors, not midwives, who seem marginal.

Two of Martha’s helpers, Polly Savage and Sarah Neal, had babies born out of wedlock,

Medicine and textiles are but two strands of a broad and largely invisible local economy managed by women. Housewives traded goods and labor, employed their own and their neighbors’ daughters, and reckoned accounts independently of their husbands.

Still, it took genuine commitment for a busy man to copy by hand hundreds of pages of an obscure diary, traveling to Boston to do so. Given the circumstances, Nash can certainly be forgiven for dropping generic references to weeding cucumbers or bleaching cloth. That he wished to preserve his own good name in the town by omitting scandal is also understandable.

We know that courts gradually abandoned the practice of fining married couples whose first child was born too soon,

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

God as the controlling power in the universe allowed death and sorrow but also provided ways to transform those events into good.

Martha’s diary supports the notion that children chose their own spouses; there is no evidence of parental negotiation, and little hint of parental supervision in any of the courtships she describes. The diary also confirms the prevalence of premarital sex. Yet there is little evidence of romance and much to suggest that economic concerns remained central. The weddings in the Ballard family were distinctly unglamorous affairs, almost nonevents. For the women, they were surrounded by an intense productivity, a gathering of resources that defined their meaning and purpose.

while the appearance of a doctor at a delivery becomes more noteworthy when the hundreds of other deliveries in which no one thought to call a physician are considered. In midwifery as in so many other aspects of Martha Ballard’s diary, it is the combination of boredom and heroism, of the usual and the unusual, that tells the story.

Nonetheless, something new was happening in her relationship with the doctor and she did not quite understand it. The arguments with Cony were a consequence of tensions inherent in the system of social medicine. Yet they may also have stemmed partly from subtle shifts in the attitudes of local physicians. As new medical ideas infiltrated the region, even conservative doctors like Daniel Cony became acutely conscious of their authority.

What the incident shows is the power of her presence in the community. Cony was threatened by her intervention, presumed or real. It also 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.

She had defined herself as a “gadder,” as a woman who left home, frequently, to care for her neighbors.

Yet the subtle shift that led Martha at the end of the week to describe Otis Pierce’s sister Hitty as “Mrs Pierce” is intriguing. Martha usually reserved “Mrs” for married women or for mature daughters of prominent men. 8 No other single mother had been given this honorific. Hitty’s alliance with John Vassall Davis had given her a peculiar eminence.

That Martha Ballard kept her diary is one small miracle; that her descendants saved it is another. When her great-great-granddaughter Mary Hobart inherited it in 1884, it was “a hopeless pile of loose unconsecutive pages”—but it was all there. The diary had remained in Augusta for more than sixty years, probably in the family of Dolly Lambard, who seems to have assumed custody of her mother’s papers along with the rented cow.

To understand Martha’s world we must approach it on its own terms, neither as a golden age of household productivity nor as a political void from which a later feminist consciousness emerged. Martha’s diary reaches to the marrow of eighteenth-century life. The trivia that so annoyed earlier readers provide a consistent, daily record of the operation of a female-managed economy. The scandals excised by local historians provide insight into sexual behavior, marital and extramarital, in a time of tumult and change. The remarkable birth records, 814 deliveries in all, allow the first full accounting of delivery practices and of obstetrical mortality in any early American town. The family squabbles that earlier readers (and abridgers) of the diary found almost as embarrassing as the sexual references show how closely related Martha’s occupation was to the life cycle of her own family, and reveal the private politics behind public issues like imprisonment for debt. The somber record of her last years provides rare evidence on the nature of aging in the preindustrial world, and shows the pull of traditional values in an era of economic and social turmoil.

The structure of the diary forces us to consider midwifery in the broadest possible context, as one specialty in a larger neighborhood economy, as the most visible feature of a comprehensive and little-known system of early health care, as a mechanism of social control, a strategy for family support, and a deeply personal calling.

Martha Ballard rarely used punctuation. Like most eighteenth-century diarists, she capitalized randomly, abbreviated freely, and spelled even proper names as the spirit moved, sometimes giving more than one spelling of a name, including those of her own family, in a single entry.

In eighteenth-century New England, farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, ship’s captains, and perhaps a very few housewives kept daybooks, running accounts of receipts and expenditures, sometimes combining economic entries with short notes on important family events and comments on work begun or completed. Other early diarists used the blank pages bound into printed almanacs to keep their own tally on the weather, adding brief entries on gardening, visits to and from neighbors, or public occurrences of both the institutional and the sensational sort. Martha Ballard did all these things.

Martha recorded debts contracted and “rewards” received, and some of the time she noted numbers of yards “got out” of the loom and varieties of beans put into the ground. Her midwifery accounts are even more methodical. She carefully labeled and numbered each delivery, adding an XX to the margin when the fee was paid.

The problem is not that the diary is trivial but that it introduces more stories than can easily be recovered and absorbed.

Nancy Norcross suffered lingering labor in an era when old childbirth practices were being challenged in both England and America by a new “scientific” obstetrics promoted by male physicians.

The late eighteenth century was not only an era of political revolution but of medical, economic, and sexual transformation. 48 Not surprisingly, it was also a time when a new ideology of womanhood self-consciously connected domestic virtue to the survival of the state. 49

A trial for rape, then, was really a contest between the men involved—the husband or father, the accused, the judges, and jury—rather than a judgment of the events themselves. This was, of course, exactly the position taken by Henry Sewall in his letter to George Thatcher. He was far more concerned with the conflict between Joseph North and Obadiah Wood than with what happened between Rebecca Foster and the men she accused. This is surprising, given Sewall’s general concern with moral behavior, yet he was already prejudiced against the Fosters, while his experience as clerk of the U.S. District Court gave him plenty of opportunity to associate with lawyers and to adopt their point of view. His letter, like the play, is essentially comic, a satirical dismissal of rural pettiness masquerading as law. 23