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The Limitations Of Martha Ballard In A Midwife's Tale

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In A Midwife’s Tale, Martha Ballard is a Hallowell midwife who chronicled many stories in her life in her diaries, such as her records on helping other women to deliver birth, her social interaction with other women in town, and most importantly, the limitations she faced from her old age and her change of status within her family later on. From Martha’s perspective, those limitations were the result of the responsibilities she had to handle with her fatigued body and without the help of her family member. However, from the author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s view, those limitations reveal the inevitable cycle of change that will happen among the two generations within a family in New England. From Martha’s perspective, her family member’s lack …show more content…

Eventually, Martha moved to her son Jonathan’s …show more content…

Historians have identified that New England contains a “family labor” system, and it was “inherently cyclical” (220). Couples begin their marriage by “raising workers and their last bereft of help”, and eventually reaching the “harvest time”, where the couple is no longer as productive as before, but now their children have grown (220). When Martha was reaching her sixties, she had already passed the peak of her live as a mistress and as a midwife. Her fatigue no longer allows her to handle too many birth deliveries and house chores, and her sons and daughters have grown up, and have married to start another cycle in the system of family labor. Ulrich also saw the diminishing status of Martha as a mistress a “subtle passing of authority from one generation to one another” because Martha’s moving to her son Jonathan’s farm shows her increasing dependence on the next generation (265). From Martha’s increasing dependence on her children, it is clear that as time goes on, the with the old generation becoming less productive, a new generation will grow up and reaching their productivity peak, and as a result takes on the authority, and just like that, a new cycle in the family labor system has

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