Film of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's 'A Midwife's Tale' chronicles daily lives, past and present

By Jane Buchbinder

Special to the Gazette

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, James Duncan Phillips Professor of American History and professor of women's studies, spends most of her time with rare books, decaying scraps of cloth, and old town records, reconstructing lives so that we may learn how America's past has had an impact on the most ordinary aspects of our own existence.

She is not, however, accustomed to analyzing the way her own days are consumed by the intricacies of historical research. A film that airs Monday night on WGBH does just that by examining the daily life of this historian.

A Midwife's Tale, a new film based on Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, is the story of two women separated by 200 years. The film follows Ulrich as she deciphers the cryptic diary of Martha Ballard, a midwife who recorded the events of her life and work in Kennebec County, Maine, from 1785 to 1812 amid the harsh forces of nature at a time of critical social change.

Ulrich came to Harvard in 1995, with a background in Colonial American history. She received her Ph.D. at the age of 42, after raising five children with her husband. Her first book, Good Wives, was an extension of her doctoral thesis about women in New Hampshire from 1650 to 1750. She stumbled upon Ballard's diary at the Maine State Library in Augusta when she was a faculty member at the University of New Hampshire; A Midwife's Tale was published in 1990.

"Finding this diary was a big deal," she says, "because there are few first-person accounts of women from that time." It took years before she understood the wealth of information that could be extracted from the journal, which is largely a log of work and activity, rather than of feelings.

But Ulrich is passionate about the ordinary nature of the record. "It's the dailiness of Martha's diary that helps us understand the really important differences between the 18th-century world and today."

A Film is Born

When Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, the film's producer, approached Ulrich with the idea of making a film based on her book, she was intrigued.

"I hadn't visualized the story beforehand," she says. "I had a sense of the pots and pans, the gardens, and Martha's hands, but I didn't care about the color of her hair or the shape of her nose -- for me these aren't important details unless they reveal something about the time period or Martha herself."

The filmmaking process stimulated Ulrich to consider some of the things she didn't know about Martha Ballard: her gestures, for example, and the distance she might stand from a patient who happened to be a man. A MacArthur Fellowship in 1992 gave her time to work on the film, which was produced by Blueberry Hill Productions of Watertown.

Kahn-Leavitt's idea was not simply to re-enact Ballard's story, but to explore, as well, how that story came to be. The film weaves scenes of the midwife's life on the rugged terrain of Kennebec with the intellectual rigors of Ulrich's work.

Ulrich played a much more visible role than she had expected. "It was very strange to be made into a character," she says. Richard Rogers, director of the film and head of Harvard's Film Studies Center, helped Ulrich surmount her self-consciousness by talking with her about what he called "the Laurel character."

The making of the film gave Ulrich a new perspective on her historical research by confronting her with questions such as: How did you make a particular discovery? What were the turning points in your research? "Laurie made me realize that the process of my work, not just its result, was actually interesting to someone else," she says.

The film spotlights the kind of detective work involved in writing a book like A Midwife's Tale. Ulrich charted and graphed the events of Ballard's life, researching their context to reconstruct the layers of meaning beneath them. Through painstaking scrutiny of the diary's 9,965 entries, Ulrich teased out the meaning of some of Ballard's most obscure notes. In one scene she decodes a simple sentence -- "Today Hannah is 18" -- to reveal a poignant, characteristically understated moment, during the scourge of scarlet fever, in which Martha is both grateful for her own daughter's health and helpless to save another woman's child.

Ulrich says the film is true to the diary, although it presents a darker story than the one she told. The film follows a series of physical attacks, deaths, difficult births, and the burning of the Ballard's own mill. The more upbeat parts of the book, such as women weaving and quilting, were hard to film in an exciting way, she explains.

Not just a Pot

Ulrich enjoys engaging her students in the intricate process of discovery depicted in A Midwife's Tale. This is why her courses rely heavily upon primary source materials, rather than just historians' accounts.

"In my course on material culture I included artifacts as well as written documents," she says. "The Harvard Museums were a wonderful resource. We had special exhibits and workshops at the Peabody and the Fogg, and I also brought in some ordinary objects from my own collection.

"I also enjoy sending students to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, one of the nation's most important archives of women's history. I am planning a new project, with Schlesinger Director Mary Maples Dunn, on women in Harvard history. It will be a two-year project joining the Charles Warren Center at Harvard and the Schlesinger, and we hope to involve alumni/ae, students, oral history, and documentary research."

As for other scholarly pursuits, Ulrich will be on leave this spring to work on her book-in-progress, The Age of Homespun, which examines textiles and artifacts from 1670 to 1820.

"I'm interested in the way in which a pot is not just a pot," she says, offering a personal example. "If you came to my cupboard and looked beneath all my Corningware, you would see one aqua and white plastic plate. It's the one dish remaining from the set that I got when I was married," she says with a smile. "I've held onto it for that reason. It's an ugly plate, but for me it's infused with all sorts of associations and meanings."

A Midwife's Tale will air on WGBH-TV (Channel 2) on Monday, Jan. 19, 9 -10:30 p.m., as the season premiere of the series, "The American Experience."