San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Area Readers on Their Most Treasured Books
Elizabeth L. Hillman is the president of Mills College.
“A Midwife’s Tale” is about how women make — and write — history. I read it during my first semester in graduate school, at a time when I was falling in love with women’s history and with the astonishing discoveries of the scholars who were writing it.
Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife who delivered 816 babies between 1785 and 1812, left behind a diary so terse it was nearly incomprehensible to everyone who encountered it. Until, that is, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the author of “A Midwife’s Tale.”
Ulrich found Ballard’s diary hiding in plain sight in the Maine State Library, and proceeded to write a breathtaking book about the power and grace of women who do the extraordinary — deliver babies! — every day. It’s not only birth that courses through “A Midwife’s Tale,” however; it’s politics and crime, doctors and farmers, storms and illnesses. In Ulrich’s hands, Ballard’s book became the treasure it had always been.