Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

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.

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.

It rests not on the observations of outsiders, but on the words of the woman herself.

At first glance, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary often appears trivial, but as Ulrich found, "it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies... For her, living was to be measured in doing."

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.

The book, divided into 10 sections, takes the "dailiness" of Ballard's diary and transforms it into a rich historical source.

A Midwife's Tale was not only methodologically influential for scholars, but also theoretically important.

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.

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.

Her approach to history has been described as a tribute to "the silent work of ordinary people".

Ulrich has also been a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient.

Her most famous book, A Midwife’s Tale, was later the basis for a PBS documentary film.

Laurel Thatcher was born July 11, 1938, in Sugar City, Idaho, to John Kenneth Thatcher, schoolteacher and superintendent as well as state legislator and farmer; and Alice Siddoway Thatcher.

She graduated from the University of Utah, majoring in English and journalism, and gave the valedictory speech at commencement.

In 1971, she earned a master's degree in English at Simmons University, and subsequently a doctorate in history from the University of New Hampshire, in 1980.

After completing her Ph.D., Ulrich joined the faculty at the University of New Hampshire, gradually working her way up from graduate assistant to tenured faculty member.

In a 1976 scholarly article about little-studied Puritan funeral services, Ulrich included the phrase "well-behaved women seldom make history."

In its original iteration, Ulrich meant the quote to indicate that well-behaved women were not studied by historians, not to encourage contemporary women to rebel or be less "well-behaved".

The phrase was taken out of context and picked up and soon went viral, being widely quoted and printed across the country.

It continues to be seen on greeting cards, T-shirts, mugs, plaques, and bumper stickers.

In 1991, Ulrich received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for her work of history, A Midwife's Tale.

In 1992, the MacArthur Foundation chose Ulrich as a MacArthur Fellow.

She remained on the faculty at UNH through 1995.

In 1995 she became James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, and director of the Charles Warren Center of Studies in American History, at Harvard University.

She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003.

She recounted how her now-famous quote has taken on a life of its own in an October 2007 interview: "It was a weird escape into popular culture. I got constant e-mails about it, and I thought it was humorous. Then I started looking at where it was coming from. Once I turned up as a character in a novel—and a tennis star from India wore the T-shirt at Wimbledon. It seemed like a teaching moment—and so I wrote a book using the title."

Well-Behaved Women examines the ways in which women shaped history, citing examples from the lives of Rosa Parks, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, and Virginia Woolf.

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.

Ulrich's revelatory history was honored with the Pulitzer Prize.

A Midwife's Tale also received the Bancroft Prize (prompting a speech by Ulrich which compares her own diary and life to Ballard's ), the John H. Dunning Prize, the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early Republic Book Prize, the William Henry Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the New England Historical Association Award.

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.

The film was based upon both Ulrich's book and her archival process, and Ulrich served as a consultant, script collaborator, and narrator.

The book also helped her secure a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Fellows Program.

She also served as President of the American Historical Association from 2009 to 2010, and of the Mormon History Association from 2014 to 2015.

Ulrich invokes these contributions to historical knowledge in a 2009 interview, stating, “I don’t think anonymous people need to be included in the historical record just because of fairness or justice.

Studying them more carefully makes for more accurate history,” highlighting the potential for work like hers on historically non-dominant voices.

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 first entry in A Midwife's Tale puts midwifery in a broader medical context within the Kennebec region, beginning to put Ballard's diary in context of other primary sources at the time.

As of 2018, Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita at Harvard.