Episode Details

Last week a principal wrote to tell me he was short 25 teachers or staff as he ended his first week back in the new semester. Another principal wrote that he spent his first morning back from Christmas break finding coverage for 9 classes without teachers. Just today in my own community, one of our elementary schools closed for the remainder of the week as the district is missing 15% of its workforce due to outbreaks of COVID.

Sadly, just when we thought we were returning to some sense of normalcy this school year, educators are again doing the hard work of rescheduling bus routes, rearranging classroom coverage, or pivoting to online learning. If no one has told you yet, thank you for the hard work you’ve already been doing in just the first few days of 2022.

This week, however, I want to pull away from the present for a few minutes and share some perspective from history. My reading goals for 2022 include several historical pieces I have not read before. For instance, this month, I decided to read The Life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary, 1785-1812, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. I enjoyed listening to it via an Audible version read by Susan Eriksen. 

What sparked my interest in the book was recognizing that I have almost exclusively read male authors from the early American periods. Except for a few poems from Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, and some letters of Abigail Adams, most of the primary documents I’ve read from that time period have been by from men.

The story of Martha Ballard as a mid-wife, brought to life by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, shines a light on past experiences from two unique perspectives. First, Ballard’s diary gives us the account of a early American healer; second, her diary tells that story from the unique perspective of a daughter, mother and grandmother of late 18th century Maine. 

Throughout the book, several themes and lessons stand out. Here are seven I’d like to share:

1. Ballard’s unique lens as a woman highlights the life of women, not just men, as central to community life.

As a midwife, Martha Ballard had a front row seat into community life, and her diary details the births, deaths, sicknesses and sometimes drama of most of the people in her community in the township of Hallowell on the Kennebec River, which is now a part of Augusta. She lost three of her nine children to a diphtheria epidemic. And her diary includes the common fate of so many other members of her community in a time before vaccinations and still believed in blood letting as a medical remedy. Martha’s stories, however, were also about weddings, church goings, family, gardening, quilting and many other pastimes that brought people together. Unlike other diaries from men during the time period, she includes the names of women in the community, with stories of their part managing homes and livelihoods of their own.

2. Women ‘healers’ had more access and credibility among medical practitioners in colonial Maine than women would even fifty years later.

Surprisingly, local physicians included Martha Ballard and other midwives in autopocies and dissections of deseased patients. Just fifty years later, the historian Laurel Tatcher Ulrich, explains this practice was almost exclusively limited to men physicians. Although in early colonial times women were primary in birthing services, that practice became more controlled by men physicians over the next decades as well. Ballard delivered 816 babies and was present for more than 1,000 births in her 27 years of service. It wasn’t until the 1849, 37 years after Martha Ballard’s death that Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in American history to graduate from medical school. It wasnt’ until the