Women in American history

Women in American History

In 1785, Martha Ballard began the diary that she would keep for the next 27 years, until her death. At a time when fewer than half the women in America were literate, Ballard faithfully recorded the weather, her daily household tasks, her midwifery duties (she delivered close to a thousand babies), her medical practice, and countless incidents that reveal the turmoil of a new nation -- dizzying social change, intense religious conflict, economic boom and bust -- as well as the grim realities of disease, domestic violence, and debtor's prison. (PBS)

That Martha Ballard kept her diary is one small miracle; that her descendants saved it is another. When her great-great-granddaughter Mary Hobart inherited it in 1884, it was "a hopeless pile of loose unconsecutive[sic] pages" -- but it was all there. The diary had remained in Augusta for more than sixty years, probably in the family of Dolly Lambard, who seems to have assumed custody of her mother's papers along with the rented cow. (Ulrich)

The Smithsonian Institution's American History Timeline places the United States' Colonial Era from 1607-1783 -- from the establishment of the Jamestown, Virginia colony to the end of the Revolutionary War. It was in this era that Martha Moore was born in Oxford, Massachusetts in 1735, and the era in which she lived almost fifty years of her life. In these years, Martha would marry Ephraim Ballard, bear nine children, and watch three of them die.

She concluded her now famous diary three days before her death in 1812. Her last entry spoke of the weather: (Ulrich)

Clear most of the day & very Cold & windy. Daughter Ballard and a Number of her Children here. Mrs. Partridge

Smith allso[sic] Revered Mr. Tappin Came and Converst

Swetly[sic] and mad[sic] a prayer adapted to my Case."

It is known that a little more than a month before her death at 77, she attended Sally Foy's delivery on April 18, and, though she suffered "two ague fits" the next day, went in a rainstorm to deliver William Saunders's wife of her third daughter and fourth child. "I laid down & slept some," she wrote, then took breakfast with the Saunders, stopped to see another patient, and came home, and "did my ironing and some mending but feel feeble." (Ulrich) Only a few days later, she was called to see a Mrs. Heath on April 24, stayed with her all day and night and into the next day: "We have slept a little. I have had ague fitts[sic] yesterday & to day[sic]."

Author's Note: "ague" is a disease characterized by recurring sweats, fever and chills) have been very ill," Martha wrote the next day -- and the next. (Ulrich)

Is it any wonder? Speculation says that she probably lived another three weeks or so. But, what a statement of her life. Perhaps this one small peek at Martha Ballard says everything about her loving spirit, unlimited energy, empathy for others, hard work, and dedication to making her world and everyone else's a better place -- characteristics not uncommon in women of the colonial and republic eras. Life was hard, but Martha Ballard chose to make the best of it by helping others. And the daily diary she left behind gives us a perspective on the everyday lives of people of that era that we would not have had any other way.

Women in the Colonial Period and the Republic Era

The years from 1789-1829 are generally considered the Early Republic era of the United States -- post-Revolution -- and roughly from Washington's inauguration to the inauguration of Andrew Jackson. There are numerous interpretations of "eras" in the U.S. And a margin of ten or twenty years is considered acceptable to most historians.

By around 1715, all of the colonies had achieved substantial communal stability: family-formation had reached levels that allowed for self-sustaining growth, and ruling elites had come together.

In colonial America, formal education for girls historically has been secondary to that for boys. In colonial America girls learned to read and write at dame schools. They could attend the master's schools for boys when there was room, usually during the summer when most of the boys were working. (Women's International Center)

During the latter half of the Republic Era, rapid economic growth presented new opportunities for northern white women. Previously limited to homework or to household-related jobs like cleaning and cooking, some young women now became school teachers or mill workers. One destination for young farm women was the Lowell mills in Massachusetts, at the falls of the Merrimac River. An unnamed rural crossroads in 1823, Lowell by 1830 boasted ten mills and three thousand operatives, nearly all of them female. (Boyer)

Beginning in the 19th century, the required educational preparation, particularly for the practice of medicine, increased. This tended to prevent many young women, who married early and bore many children, from entering professional careers. Although home nursing was considered a proper female occupation, nursing in hospitals was done almost exclusively by men. (Women's International Center)

The late eighteenth century was an era of medical, economic, and sexual transformation. It was also a time when a new ideology of womanhood self-consciously connected domestic virtue to the survival of the state. Most scholars agree that the period of Martha's diary, 1785-1812, was an era of profound change, or that in some still dimly understood way, the nation's political revolution and the social revolutions that accompanied it were related. (Ulrich)

Martha Ballard's diary makes quite clear that men did monopolize public business, that households were formally patriarchal, and the women did uncritically assume that houses and even babies belonged to men and that the proper way to identify a married woman was by reference to her husband. Yet the diary also shows a complex web of social and economic exchange that engaged women beyond the household. (Ulrich)