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)

Conclusions

In the first half of the nineteenth century, America was rural and had a pre-industrial...

It was in this world that Martha Ballard lived and worked. Ballard was the town's well-respected and extremely busy midwife. Nevertheless, she was still expected to maintain her household up to the standards of the day. There were numerous, never-ending tasks to be completed - weaving, spinning, cleaning, cooking, churning butter, the list goes on. However, Martha was not expected to take care of the entire household on her own. She had daughters, nieces, and female neighbors to help her. That help was the key for the colonial woman.
After the Revolution and into the early 19th century, many women, especially but not only widows, owned businesses. Women worked as apothecaries, barbers, blacksmiths, sextons, printers, tavern-keepers and midwives. During those decades, the stage was being set for the more dramatic changes in women's lives. Taken together, trends in education, law, work, and fertility indicate that the years of the early republic set in motion large-scale forces with profound consequences for women. (Lewis) The housewife of 1780 and of 1820 faced much the same set of daily tasks, but the cultural meaning attached to housework had shifted and thereby rendered it invisible as work and instead became sentimentalized as service provided as a "gift."

Bibliography

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Do History. "Who Was Martha Ballard?" n.d. Do History. 19 February 2009 http://dohistory.org/martha/index.html.

Lewis, Jone Johnson. "Women and Work in Early America." n.d. about.com. 20 February 2009 http://womenshistory.about.com/od/worklaborunions/a/early_america.htm.

PBS. "Martha Ballard's Diary." n.d. PBS. 19 February 2009 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/midwife/gallery/index.html.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale. New York: Random House, 1990.

Women's International Center. "Women's History in America." 1994. Women's International

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