Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (born July 11, 1938) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian specializing in early America and the history of women, and a professor at Harvard University.
[9] In a 1976 scholarly article about little-studied Puritan funeral services, Ulrich included the phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history.
A Midwife's Tale examines the life of Northern New England midwife Martha Ballard, and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, the nature of marriage and sexual relations, aspects of medical practice, and the prevalence of violence and crime.
In this book, Ulrich effectively and simultaneously builds historical knowledge of the colonial world and Martha Ballard's biography.
A Midwife's Tale was later developed into a docudrama film for the PBS series American Experience by producer Laurie Kahn-Levitt and director Richard P. Rogers.
[19] The book became a landmark in women's labor history since it provides scholars with rich insights into the life of a lay American rural healer around 1800.
"[20]: 9 By knitting together "ordinary" sources to produce a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich shows how a skilled practitioner functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres.
By showing clearly the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and demonstrating the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, the book revises the understanding of prescribed gender roles.
While A Midwife's Tale is obviously limited in terms of time (1785–1812) and place (rural Maine), it has attracted sustained attention of historians—especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labor, and women's work before industrialization.
[21] The book has also been taught as an exemplar of archival and historical work and explored in conjunction with Ulrich's own life as a historian, writer, and activist.
The mid-eighteenth century is seen as a turning point in history when children began only then to choose their own partners[citation needed] and Ballard's diary entries support this.
In November, her husband Ephraim is at muskie-point and all of his instruments were stolen at the outset of a planned extended surveying journey - canceling the trip, he returned five days later.
Ulrich discusses that in 1820, a Harvard Medical School professor published a treatise stating that women should no longer be midwives as they are not educated enough to practice medicine.
Ulrich writes, “The economy of Martha’s telling contrasts with the more self-conscious narrative published (and probably composed) by Peter Edes, editor of Augusta’s Kennebec Gazette.” In Section 10, Ulrich discusses the importance of women in field agriculture, as characterized by Martha's garden and her records of the flowers and vegetables she planted in her time.
In January 2017, Ulrich's book A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870, was released.
[24] In 2001, Ulrich wrote The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, published by Alfred Knopf.
Historian John Demos praises the book in his review, "Venturing off in a new and highly original direction, she has put physical objects ― mainly but not entirely textiles ― at the center of her inquiry.
The result is, among other things, an exemplary response to a longstanding historians' challenge ― to treat objects, no less than writings, as documents that speak to us from and about the past.
[26] She also co-edited (with Emma Lou Thayne) All God's Critters Got a Place in the Choir, a collection of essays about the lives of Mormon women.
Ulrich was a co-founder, with Claudia Bushman, Judy Dushku, Sue Paxman and others, of Exponent II, an independent publication on the experience of Latter-day Saint women.