Pulitzer Prize History Winner
A Midwife's Tale
by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Summary
Ulrich builds an entire world from the spare diary of Martha Ballard, a midwife in Maine who recorded her deliveries, household labor, and community life across the decades after the American Revolution. By patiently decoding entries that earlier historians dismissed as trivial, she reconstructs women's work, frontier medicine, marriage, and economy in early New England. The book transformed how scholars read ordinary documents and showed the power of one woman's daily record.
”
Historical Context & Significance
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for History for this study, which a documentary film later adapted for the PBS series American Experience.