A Midwife's Tale (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

By SparkNotes

A Midwife's Tale (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
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Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.   Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:   *Chapter-by-chapter analysis
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• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411476578

Book preview

Cover of SparkNotes Guide to A Midwife’s Tale by SparkNotes Editors

A Midwife’s Tale

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7657-8

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Contents

Context

Plot Overview

Character List

Analysis of Major Characters

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Important Quotations Explained

Key Facts

Context

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was born in 1938 and raised in Sugar City, Idaho. She received her B.A. from the University of Utah. Soon after, she moved to New England and received her Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire. After graduating, she became a professor of American history at the same school, specializing in the histories of women in early America. During this time, she married fellow teacher Gael Ulrich and became the mother of three girls and two boys. Like the women whose lives she studied, Ulrich gained a firsthand experience of the struggles inherent in balancing the needs of a family with both at-home and office work. Despite this struggle, Ulrich remained dogged in her research, finding and bringing to light the lives of women who were so often ignored in the histories of men.

In 1982, Ulrich compiled these histories and used them as the material for her first book, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650 –1750. Around this time, Ulrich was doing research in Augusta, Maine, and decided to look up two diaries she had seen in a bibliography of women’s history. Though the first was a disappointing ten-page typescript, the other diary belonged to a woman named Martha Ballard—two fat volumes bound in homemade linen covers. Because she had found so few documents written