Juanita Brooks Lecture Series
The
Significance of Trivia
by
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Although I did
not know Juanita Brooks personally, her work and life had an influence on mine.
In 1970, when a group of us in the Boston area agreed to edit a "women's
issue" of Dialogue, we asked Juanita Brooks to contribute an essay.
Because I knew and admired her historical writing, I was both surprised and
delighted when her essay "I Married A Family" arrived in my mailbox.
For a young Mormon mother struggling to define an intellectual life, it was a
great comfort to know that a renowned historian had once hidden her typewriter
under the ironing.1 Juanita Brooks' example taught me that
housewives could be thinkers, too.
I did not follow
Juanita Brooks into Mormon history. I once thought of doing so. When I applied to
the graduate program in American history at the University of New Hampshire, I
intended to write about Mormon culture, but my first graduate seminar
distracted me into the colonial period and I have been there ever since. I was
pleased, however, when Douglas Alder asked me to speak today about the methods
I used in writing A Midwife's Tale and to make some suggestions about
their relevance to Mormon diaries.
I can illustrate
my approach to Martha Ballard's diary with a family anecdote. My oldest son, Karl,
an engineer, pleased me immensely by taking my book along on vacation. To my
delight, he actually read it. "Mom, what amazed me about the book was how
free you were to go beyond the facts. The book is so imaginative." A few
weeks later, Karl's wife. Nancy Bentley, a professor of American literature,
read the book. Part way into it, she exclaimed, "It's so scientific!"
Karl
and Nancy are not the first to point out that A, Midwife's Tale uses
methods from both literature and the social sciences. Perhaps that has
something to do with the fact that I had two degrees in literature before I
began a Ph.D. in history. But my approach is really not unique. History is an
eclectic discipline. By its very nature it bridges fields. At my university,
the history department is housed in the Horton Social Science Center, but most
of the faculty participate quite happily in the activities of the Humanities
Division. I find history exciting because of its commitment to facts and
because of its invitation to imagination. A few years ago, at a Mormon History
Association meeting at Canandaigua, New York, I ran into a friend, Paul Dredge.
I asked him what an anthropologist was doing at a history meeting. He told me
that he had recently discovered how interesting history could be. "When I
was a student I thought of historians as mere fact-gatherers," he
said. "Now I know that they are also patternmakers." I have used
that story frequently in my own teaching. History is both fact-gathering and
pattern-making. That is one of the things that make it so challenging.
Today I would
like to try to illustrate the fact-gathering and the pattern-making in A
Midwife's Tale. Since the time is limited I have decided to select one
theme. I deliberately picked the most "boring" theme in the book, the
seemingly most trivial. I am not going to talk about the 814 births recorded in
Martha Ballard's diary or her adventurous journeys on the Kennebec River. Nor
will I talk about the rape trial, the murders or suicides, or Ephraim Ballard's
imprisonment for debt. In honor of Juanita Brooks' ironing, I am going to talk
about housework. I hope to convince you that housework does indeed have a
history, a history as important for understanding pioneer Utah as for understanding
eighteenth-century Maine.
The first thing
to note is that housework has not always been limited to the house. Martha
Ballard, like other women of her time, was responsible for
growing food, milking cows, birthing lambs, and raising poultry as well as for processing
and preserving food and manufacturing cloth and clothing. Her
"housework" was as often with a shovel as a broom. She pitched snow
out of unsealed upstairs chambers in winter, shoveled manure from under the
outhouse into her garden in the spring, and every fall banked the foundation of
her house with dirt, shoveling it away in the spring.2
Martha Moore
Ballard was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1735. She and her husband and
five children emigrated to the Kennebec River country of central Maine in 1777.
Three other children had died in the terrible Oxford diphtheria epidemic of
1769. The Ballards' ninth and last child was born in Maine in 1778. Martha's
diary opens in January 1785, when she was fifty years old. It continues,
unbroken, for twenty-seven years, ending in May 1812, a few weeks before her
death at the age of seventy-seven. The diary is a rich and revealing record of
ordinary life in a formative period of our nation's history, a unique chronicle
of obstetrical and medical practices in eighteenth century Maine, and a moving
account of aging and death in pro-industrial America. But it is not easy to
use.
Without a pattern to guide interpretation, the accumulation of facts sometimes becomes overwhelming. It is one
thing to read about Martha's exciting canoe ride on the Kennebec River at the
height of the spring "freshet." It is another to comprehend her
laconic references to beans put into the ground, yards of wool "got
out" of the loom, or visitors entering or leaving the house. Little wonder
that her town's nineteenth-century historian pronounced most of the entries
"brief and with some exceptions not of general interest." Although a
later writer incorporated an abridged and expurgated version of the diary in
his own History of Augusta, he too found much of the diary "trivial and
unimportant. . .being but a repetition of what has been recited many
times." A recent history of childbirth came to the same conclusion.
"Like many diaries of farm women," it concludes, Martha Ballard's
diary "is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes."3
My effort to
recover Martha Ballard's life was in large part an enterprise in recapturing
the historical significance of "trivia." I began by counting things.
If historians could learn from documents as dull and impersonal as tax lists,
census records, and deeds, why not from the seemingly unrevealing lists in a
woman's diary? Not knowing quite where I was going, I constructed data sheets
with codes for washing, weaving, spinning, brewing, gardening, and other such
things. Using these sheets, I was able to count the incidence of virtually
every activity mentioned in the diary. It was a little bit like shoveling
manure. To keep my sanity, I used the data sheets for even-numbered years,
taking more traditional qualitative notes for those in between.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I
was invited to contribute an essay to a volume on the new labor history of
early America. I began to tally up my check marks. It was soon obvious that
some entries in the diary (like churchgoing, births, or records of visitors)
were very systematic and others were erratic, seemingly random. The entries to
laundry were especially puzzling. Was I to assume that the Ballards had clean
clothes four times in June 1796 but only once between the beginning of April
and the end of June in 1792? I set the problem aside and began the laborious
task of identifying the helpers in Martha Ballard's household from 1785-1800.
Suddenly the pattern fell into place. Martha Ballard was less likely to mention
laundry when somebody else was around to do it.4
Martha Ballard's
seemingly trivial struggles with washday helped me to unlock an important theme
in the history of the northern rural economy—the waxing and waning of household
labor. Colonial historians have contrasted the "family labor system"
of New England with the slave labor systems of the south and the Caribbean and
the indentured servitude common in the Middle Atlantic, but few historians have
probed the inherent instability of family labor. Family laborers arrive as
helpless infants; when they are at the height of their productivity they leave
to form families of their own. Furthermore, in a society that structures work
according to gender, they come in unpredictable mixtures of boys and girls. The
pressures on female labor are compounded in newly settled areas where daughters
tend to marry earlier than sons.
When Martha
Ballard's diary opened she was at the peak of her own productivity. At the age
of fifty she not only had the energy and economic resources, but teen-aged
daughters at home. By developing her textile production capacity, she was able
to keep them there. Her diary entry for October 26,1789, puts it succinctly:
"My girls spun 23 double skeins & wove 27 1/2 yds last weak & did
the housework besides." With Dolly and Hannah and their cousin Parthena
Barton available to milk the cow, feed the chickens, and prepare food for the
men, Martha was able to develop her midwifery practice to its capacity of more
than 50 deliveries a year. The interdependence of the mother and daughters
defined the harvest period of the Ballard family economy, a period
corresponding with the first ten years of the diary.
When the last daughter married, the
diary subtly changed. For the first time, Martha began to use her laconic
entries to explore her own feelings. Consider this entry for January 15, 1796:
Cloudy. I was at Mr
Mathews. His wife was delivered at 6 hour morning of a fine daughter after a
severe illness. Her first Child. I received 9/. Made a present of 1/6 to the
infant. I returned home and find my house up in arms. How long God will preserve
my strength to perform as I have done of late he only knows. May I trust in him
at all times and do good and hee will fullfill his promis according to my Day.
May he giv me strength and may I Conduct accordingly.
In the left hand
margin of the entry she wrote "Birth 4th" even though this was only
the third birth of the year. In the right margin she wrote, "this is the
612th Birth I have attended at Since the year 1777. The first I assisted was
the wife of Petton Warrin, July 1778." Her handwriting got smaller and
smaller as it moved down the page. As she faced her own small crisis, the
difficulty in maintaining an arduous obstetrical and medical practice without
trustworthy help at home, she began to contemplate her own history.
This is one of
the places in A Midwife's Tale where systematic analysis of data was
insufficient. I was, after all, dealing with a literary document, a document
that despite its formulaic quality was shaped by the personality and
circumstance of its author. This is probably one of the places in the book
where Karl thought I felt free to leave the "facts" behind. This is
what I wrote:
Martha prayed not for ease or for release from her
burdens, but for strength, for the physical ability to continue the work
she had done for so
long. . . . Her body ached. The attacks of colic were coming more frequently.
She had no one to preserve order at home when she walked out under the stars to
serve her neighbors: 'find my house up in arms.' The image is a curious one, as
though the floorboards, pothooks, and bedsteads had risen against her. It was
not her husband and sons who were disturbed. If they had been home at all, they
had gotten their supper and breakfast themselves, leaving their platters and
mugs, unmade beds, and stiffening stocks behind them. It was no human enemy but
Martha's house that had taken up arms against her. .
. . .The phrase is idiomatic, of course, yet it suggests an attitude.
A house could be an adversary. Turn your back, and it rippled into disorder.
Chairs tipped. Candles slumped. Egg yolks hardened in cold skillets. Dust
settled like snow. Only by constant effort could a woman conquer her
possessions. Mustering grease and ashes, shaking feather beds and pillows to
attention, scrubbing floors and linens into subjection, she restored
a fragile order to a fallen world.
This instrumental, near-adversarial relationship to her house is obliquely
confirmed by the dearth of positive references. She celebrated the growth of
lambs and parsley in her diary, but never the arrangement of her furniture or
rooms. . . Whenever possible, she delegated routine housework to others. In
her universe, "Girls washt" was an important statement, something on
the order of "got across the river safely."5
I admit to having extended Martha's
metaphor in my own discussion of this passage, but I would argue that my
interpretation was not simply a flight of imagination (or projection.) I am
sure that my own encounters with housework helped me to see more in this entry
than I might otherwise have done, but I was very conscious as I wrote of the
details of late eighteenth-century (as opposed to late twentieth century)
housekeeping, of the rhythm of men's work in the Ballard family, and of the
overall treatment of houses and housekeeping in Martha's own record. Beyond
that I was interested in bringing to life a theme that seemed to me
central to the larger biography.
More difficult to analyze than the work
entries in the diary were the endless lists of visitors. I counted those, too.
But again I tried to move beyond quantification to a deeper probing of the
document before me. I tried to understand the relationship between these bland
lists of names and other entries in the diary. Above all I tried to understand
what these names meant to Martha. The issue was not what Martha left out that I
wanted to know but what Martha put in that she needed to know. Gradually I began
to see the patterns that had eluded me. Names were a kind of shorthand for
social and economic transactions that literally held together Martha's world. A
family mode of production of necessity encompassed wide-ranging
exchanges with neighbors. Families continually reached toward a self-sufficiency
that eluded them. A wage economy concentrated lines of dependence; household
economies survived only by spreading their debts, by weaving a complex web of
obligation capable of sustaining the household in difficult times.
Wives as well as
husbands were engaged in exchanges beyond the household. On September 9,1788,
for example, while Ephraim Ballard and his sons were at town meeting, Martha
and one of her neighbors were busy concluding some private business of their
own:
Mrs Savage here. Shee has spun 40 double skeins for me
since April 15th and had 2 Bushi of ashes & some phisic for James, &
Dolly [Martha's daughter] wove her 7 yds of Diaper. I let her have 1 skein of
lining warp. The whole is 6/ [shillings].
Such entries
represent a minimal record of Martha's economic exchanges with her neighbors.
Most transactions never made it nto the diary. On June 21, 1787, for example,
she reported that vierriam Pollard had "sent home 5 Ib of poark which shee
Borrowed 12 of April 1786," but the entry for April 12 says sin-i-)ly,
"I went to Mr. Williams. Mrs Pollard came home with me." Much of the
diary can be reduced to just such a simple grammar ol" coming and going:
"I went to Mr Westons" [or Pollards, or Howards, or Husseys, or
Fosters]. "Mrs Savage [or Densmore or Burton or Hamlin or Woodward] came
here."
In summary, A
Midwife's Tale emphasizes the importance of understanding the family life
cycle in the history of woman's work. It argues that in a rural economy in which
male names dominated on storekeeper's accounts, tax lists, and census records,
women were engaged in viable and largely autonomous economic activities, that
home production was supported by a lively system of exchange in which women
bartered and traded with each other independent of their husbands. Martha
Ballard's laconic listing of her work was in part a validation of it. "For
her, living was to be measured in doing. Nothing was trivial."6
The content and
the cadences of Martha Ballard's diary are echoed in women's writing from early
Utah. Notice the flow of goods in these entries from the diary of Eliza
Partridge Lyman during her early days in the Salt Lake Valley.
April 19,1849: Sold a ball of candle wick for 31/2 Quarts
of corn. April 25,1849: Carded and spun 3 balls candle wick. Jane James a
colored woman let me have about 2 Ibs of flour it being about half she had.
June 11, 1849: Mother carried the cotton yarn that she has
carded and spun to the weavers. Maria Lyman sent us some cloth for pillow
cases and a few dried apples. September 6, 1849: Made a Babies dress for sister
Rich, for which I get 1 Ib of wool."7
Eliza used the
verb "sold" where Martha Ballard might have written "gave"
or "received," but the dual responsibilities to produce and to
exchange are as pronounced in one diary as the other.
The similarities with Patty
Sessions' diary are even more apparent. Sessions' took up the practice of midwifery in
rural Maine as Martha Ballard was laying it down. The two diaries are cut from
the same pattern. Martha Ballard began hers at the age of 50, Patty Sessions at
51. Both diaries intersperse household accounts, records of visitors, and
general observations with mid-wifery records. Both are laconic. Sessions'
perhaps even more so than Ballard's. "Sowed turnip seed. . . weeded
garden. . .Put "Sister Harper
to bed with a son born 6:30 PM. . .baked and brewed."8 Which
diarist is writing? In this case, Patty Sessions, in July 1863. It might just
as well have been Martha Ballard in 1793. Martha would have said
"Mrs" where Patty said "Sister," of course, and she usually
"wed" rather than "weeded" her garden, but the style and
even the content of the diaries are markedly similar.
At this level of analysis, the
differences between the diaries seem almost accidental. Yet to argue that Eliza
Lyman's transactions were identical to Martha Ballard's or that Patty Sessions
was simply a Maine midwife transplanted to the arid west is not only to deny
much that is distinctive about Mormonism but to overlook profound changes in
the construction of gender in the United States. And 1793 was not 1863, in
Maine or in Utah. There is much in Martha Ballard's story that is generic to
rural women across the United States and much that is particular to a Maine
river town in the late 1700s. Martha's diary is representative of a folk genre
that persisted well to the end of the nineteenth century and that has
descendants in the line-a-day diaries of our parents, but it was not the only
literary form available to nineteenth-century women. To use Martha Ballard's
diary as a pattern for studying Mormon women's writings is to insist upon
detailed reconstruction of all the particulars of their lives.
Utah women were part
of a Utopian, communal experiment that introduced a new dynamic—plural
marriage—into an already complex family labor system. When Eliza Lyman made her
diary entries about carding and spinning candle wick, she was living in a log
cabin with her mother, her fifteen-year-old brother, and two sisters, one of
whom was already a "sister wife" and the other who would eventually
become one. The household also included Eliza's baby and a child by one of the
other plural wives. "Mr Lyman," she wrote, was present "part of
the time."9 What happened to the traditional division of labor
in such a ^household? How did plural marriage affect the overall division of
female and male labor within a community? How did relations of affection or
authority change as women who might have been temporary helpers in their
sisters' or neighbors' households instead became "sister wives"?
Certainly there is a great deal more to be learned about the social
organization of daily life in early Utah.
Intertwined with
this theme is another. Martha Ballard's hand spinning took place in an age when
no other method was possible, Eliza Lyman's in an age of water-powered textile
production. The age of hand-production was prolonged in Utah not only because
of a frontier setting but because of the religious need to achieve territorial
self-sufficiency. There is a striking echo here with the promotion of home
industry in the revolutionary era and during the conflict leading up to the War
of 1812. The difference, of course, is that by the time the first company
arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley, the industrial revolution had already
begun to transform the United States economy. How did the competing dynamics of
family production and factory production intersect with Mormon communalism in
early Utah? And how did that affect women's labor?
Historian Jeanne Boydston has argued
that the wage economy that replaced rural productivity in the northeastern
United States in the first half of the nineteenth century changed the ideological
meaning of women's work even more dramatically than its content. This
transition was occasioned not so much by changes in women's work as by a shift in
male economic authority from land owning to wage earning. True, much
production passed out of the household, but, with an elevated standard of
decency, new work entered. Housewives continued to sew, mend, and launder
clothing; grow, preserve, and cook food; and care for the frighteningly mortal
bodies as well as the eternal minds of their children. But in the prescriptive literature
that defined the emerging doctrine of "separate spheres," women's
household labor lost its identity as work. As Boydston explains:
The language of the ideology of
spheres was the language of gender, but its essential dualism was less
precisely the opposition of 'female' and 'male' than it was the opposition of
'home' and 'work,' an opposition founded on the gendering of the concept
of labor.10
Men worked;
women were "at home." The 1980s bumper sticker, "every mother is
a working woman," is a humorous rejoinder to that still
prevalent nineteenth-century construction.
Furthermore, as Richard Bushman has
explained, middle-class Americans in the nineteenth-century adopted values that
in the eighteenth-century had been confined to the gentry. They sought
to beautify their homes and yards, polish their manners, and cultivate leisure.
For middle-class housewives that meant hiding their productive activities in a
now invisible kitchen in order to present a lady-like appearance
on the front porch or parlor.11 The euphemism "lady" for
" woman" originated in thi& transition. Martha Ballard saw her
marriage as an economic partnership. Women worked or the family did not
survive. A generation later, men supported women.
These three factors—plural marriage, the
quest for territorial self-sufficiency, and the changing ideology of women's
work—play under the surface of two documents from late nineteenth-century
Utah, the memoir of Lucy Meserve Smith and diary of Sarah Davis Thatcher.
Lucy
Meserve Smith was born in 1817 in Newry, Maine, not far from where Patty
Sessions lived. Lucy was proud of her New England origins. The memoir which she
wrote in Salt Lake City in 1889 is filled with stories of pioneer life on the
Androscoggin (she called it the "Andrew Scoggin") River where her
grandparents settled in the late eighteenth century.12 Even her
memories of early years in Utah are shaped by New England stories. She told of
making sugar from "Honey Dew" that appeared on the cottonwood and willow
leaves one "very dry warm spring and summer," using techniques she
had seen her mother use with maple syrup.13
Lucy
became one of six plural wives of George Albert Smith. In the 1850s she lived
with "Sister Hannah" in Provo. It was there that she attempted to
establish another New England tradition—the spinning bee or frolic. Spinning
bees can be traced to at least the 1750s in New England. They are most visible
during the pre-revolutionary boycotts of 1769-1770 and 1810, but they
continued in some towns into the 1820s. Newspaper stories emphasize the
competitive aspects of the spinning bees, and tie them to the political
objective of establishing political and later economic independence from Great
Britain. My own research has shown that even at the height of the
pre-revolutionary fervor, most spinning bees were organized around churches and
the yarn donated to the minister and his wife or to the poor.14
Lucy's spinning
bee seems to have been a spontaneous and essentially private affair, organized
by four Provo women, probably in the early 1850s.
When things got a
little more plenty myself Sister Eliza Terril, Sister Rua Angeline Holden and
Sister Hannah Maria Smith took our spinning Wheels and went to a large room in
the Seminary and tride our best to see who could reel of the greatest No. of knots
from sunrise to sunset. Sister Terril 100,11. knots. Sister Holden not quite so
many but better twist on hers. Sister H.M. Smith and I made the best yam. It was
equal for twist but I had a few knots the most but she spun a reeled 80. knots.
On the whole we concluded we all beat.15
The details of
this story, the all day work, the careful measuring of skeins and twist, fit
well with the New England models. Her humorous description of a contest in
which everyone "beat" is not out of character with the cooperative
character of women's work in early New England, though it may say something as
well for the anxieties of communalism in early Utah. Her good humored reference
in a later passage to "playing" on the "Whimmikie Whammikie two
Standard Lillikie Strikiety Huffity Whirlimagig (Flax Wheel)" also
highlights the sociability of early textile production.
This is not
inconsistent, however, with genuine pride of craft. By the time Lucy was born,
spinning factories had already taken over much of the production of plain
cotton thread, but handspinning of wool continued, and the availability of
"factory warp" actually accentuated rather than retarded home weaving
at least until the 1840s. Even though Lucy went to work in a "cotton
factory" for a short while before joining the Saints in Nauvoo,16 her
memoir emphasizes hand production.
The Pioneer
Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City owns a^ linen tablecloth with a hand-netted
fringe said to have been used in "the George Albert Smith home in
Provo." It looks very much like early nineteenth-century linen made in New
Hampshire and Maine. I have no doubt but what it was Lucy's. Plural marriage
may have encouraged a higher level of specialization than would have been
possible for a monogamous wife. As she explains in her memoir, "I sat in
my loom month after month and wove while Sister Hannah and the boys did the
other work."17 Like Maine weavers of her generation, Lucy was
not content with mere utilitarian production but wove patterns into the ground of
plain homespun linen. "The draft work was very hard and difficult to get
every figure right," she recalled, [but] "that I would have if I had
to undo a half yard."18
Lucy's memoir,
written in old age, celebrates productivity. Now dependent on others, she wants
the world to know she was once a worker:
I can count up nearly 50 bed coverleds I have
woven. I carded and spun the cotton and formed the draft, and wove one
coun-terpin for myself, which is yet good. If my friends could know of the
great amount of spinning cotton flax tow and wool, and the many hundreds of
yard of draft work such as diaper and carpets besides the white counterpins,
and coverleds, besides six years work in the cotton factories, with the
addition of being driven from my home in the winter, having scurvy for lack of
vegatables &c. They would wonder that I am alive say nothing about my
helpless condition at the presant time.
I have colored many pounds of yarn with madder, Indigo,
Logwood, Red-wood, Cochineal, Bagle [?] wood. Tan Bark cotton-wood bark,
copperas,allum, sage-brush, yellow weed. Onion-peals, and Magenta. I have cut
and made dresses cloaks coats pants and Temple suits with their aprons &c.
... I have cut torn and sewed hundreds of pounds of rags for carpets and rugs,
also woven many rag carpets braided and sewed many mats and rugs, I have
braided Palm-leaf and straw-hats and sewed the straw hats myself. I have
knitted stockings, socks, and mittens nearly enough to fill a barrel. I have
also knitted yards of edgings and netted a few yds.
I have done considerable nice quilting, besides cutting,
peacing, and carding bats. I have also carded bats and tacked mattresses, and
comforters for the beds.
I took a few
lessons in drawing and a few lessons in French.19
Lucy's
French and drawing lessons gave her a modest claim to gentility, but industry
is the dominant theme in her story. The memoir is a personal plea for
understanding. But it is also a nostalgic recreation of a world that has
passed. Like her counterparts in New England, Lucy Smith lived to see the end
of the "Age of Homespun" and with it a profound redefinition of
women's work.
Lucy's memoir
contrasts sharply with the diary of Sarah Davis Thatcher. Sarah Davis was born
October 14, 1852 in Salt Lake City. She was six years old when her older sister
Rachel married John Bethuel Thatcher of Logan, Utah. When Rachel was almost
forty, Sarah became John's second wife in plural marriage. Rachel had five
rambunctious sons, ages four to nineteen, and two little girls, ages eight and
ten. She may initially have welcomed her sister's help. But cohabitation
proved difficult. "I couldn't even put on the potatoes to cook
right," Sarah complained to her diary.20 Sarah's first child
was bom in February 1878, six months before Rachel's eleventh and last child.21
A few months later, Sarah moved to her own house.
Sarah Thatcher
made intermittent but highly revealing entries in her journal. For our purposes
one of the most interesting describes a family quarrel over a piece of calico.
July 11, 1880: John
had got me calico for two dresses and ten yards for aprons for myself and
children. R. [Rachel] told Mother T. that day that John grumbled at getting so
much calico for me, and she told him he mustn't get any more wives if he couldn't
keep the ones he had. He said he was going to get one. who could keep
herself next time. That made me angry, and I said I didn't think he'd find
many that would do better than I had, for it was the first time he'd brought me
any calico dresses, and this is the fourth summer I've been his wife. R.
said Oh! I'd had one before. Yes, but that was off of a bolt of damaged
that only cost 5 cts. a yard, I said. I think they'd better throw that
at me. That dress cost 55 cts.22
ENDNOTES
1 Juanita Leavitt
Brooks, " I Married A Family," Dialogue, VI
(Summer 1971), pp. 15-21.
2 For a brief
description of the range of Martha Ballard's work, see my essay " Martha
Ballard and Her Girls: Women's Work in Eighteenth-Century Maine," in
Stephen Innes, ed. Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill and
London:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 74-78.
3 James W. North, History of Augusta (Augusta, Maine,
1870), p. 297; Charles Elventon Nash, The History of Augusta : First
Settlement and Early Days as a Town. Including the Diarv of Mrs. Martha Moore
Ballard (1785-1812). (Augusta, Maine, 1904, 1961), p. 234; Richard W. Wertz
and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (New
York:
Schocken, 1977), p. 9.
4 For a detailed discussion of
this data, see "Martha Ballard and Her Girls, "pp. 88-105.
5 Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard. Based on Her Diarv.
1785-1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 218-219.
6 Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale.
p. 9.
7 Godfrey, et al, pp.
250,251,253,257.
8 Diary of Patty
Sessions, typescript. Historical Department, Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, p. 97.
9 Godfrey, Godfrey, and Derr, pp.
248,414n3.
