The Power of the Ordinary

"Martha's Diary and Mine" by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (1991)

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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (b. 1931) is a beloved figure in history circles. Born in Sugar City, Idaho, she moved to Salt Lake City to attend college at the University of Utah and then settled permanently on the East Coast. While raising five children with her husband, Ulrich was active both in her ward in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in the burgeoning Latter-day Saint feminist movement. Beginning in the early 1970s, she and several friends organized home gatherings, retreats, and a newspaper called Exponent II that explored women’s place in society, history, and religion. The activities sparked Ulrich’s interest in women’s history, and when her husband took an academic post at the University of New Hampshire, she began graduate studies in history. Balancing family, church, activism, and education was demanding, but she persevered. In 1982, two years after she received her doctorate, she published her first book, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750.

It took five years after her graduation to move into a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at UNH. In the meantime, she had received two prestigious grants to start a new project on the diary of an unknown Maine midwife, Martha Moore Ballard. It was Ulrich’s meticulous unpacking of this diary that resulted in A Midwife’s Tale, the dazzling portrait of an early American woman. As soon as it was published in 1990, a cascade of prizes from professional historical societies applauded her book. Reprinted here is the acceptance speech Ulrich gave after winning the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.

Acceptance speeches are typically celebratory and ceremonial, but the Bancroft organizational committee specifically asked that the address be personal. So, while the last paragraph does express gratitude, the bulk of the address links Ulrich’s own life to that of Martha Ballard’s. The Bancroft address duplicates what historian Mary Maples Dunn saw in A Midwife’s Tale: the life of a “professional woman whose professional responsibilities did not relieve her of the ordinary work of women.”¹ Because Bancroft Prize acceptance speeches are not normally published, Ulrich addressed only a small coterie of attending scholars and her own family. A Midwife’s Tale won the Pulitzer Prize a few months later.

In addition, a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship supported Ulrich’s research on the social history of New England textiles. And, in 1992, Ulrich received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. Then, in 1995, the Department of History at Harvard University invited her to join its august ranks. The early nineties were heady years for the professor from New Hampshire. After PBS funded a documentary based on A Midwife’s Tale, a website was created that included the Bancroft acceptance speech. At that point, the audience expanded so that many came to appreciate the humanity, humor, and acumen of one of America’s preeminent historians. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich retired from teaching in 2018, but her multiple publications remain standards in American history.

“Martha’s Diary and Mine” is a lyrical testimony to the pleasures of history making. The address articulates the almost mystical way historical characters are brought to life through writing. Ulrich accomplishes this project by placing her own diary—kept sporadically—next to Martha Ballard’s diary. The eighteenth century and the twentieth are thus knit together. In their writing, historians ordinarily do not conflate their own lives with those they study, but since the Bancroft committee had requested a more personal approach, Ulrich took advantage of the opportunity to enliven social history by connecting the diaries of two women.

To bring the audience into her stories and reveal the magic of the professional historian, Ulrich uses several rhetorical devices. First, she compares herself with Martha Ballard. Not only does Ulrich tell us she keeps a diary (somewhat) like Ballard, but she narrates the multiple places where her life and Ballard’s intersect. For instance, Martha Ballard began her diary when she was fifty, and when Laurel Ulrich turned fifty, she wanted “a beginning, too.” Ballard’s children get diphtheria, Ulrich’s “upset tummies.” While both diary writers are tired at the end of the day, it is Gael, the modern husband, who “holds things together at home.” Comparisons create a through line in “Martha’s Diary and Mine” and solidify the intimate relationship between the historian and the person of the past.

To enliven the speech, Ulrich also employs the rhetorical technique of including quotes from her own diary. With her characteristic self-deprecating wit, Ulrich recalls her enthusiasm when her first book came out in 1982. In her 357 diary, she jokes that her mother, husband, and neighbor all found Good Wives worth reading, but she craves “gushing reviews [and] a Bancroft Prize would be nice, too.” Ulrich had long ago forgotten that cheeky admission in her diary, but there it was. With this stylistic move she brings together her diary making with the event at hand, directly addressing the small Bancroft audience.

Ulrich’s diary quotations are in support of another rhetorical practice, that of storytelling or narrative construction. Throughout the address are personal anecdotes and family facts. Details—like the names and ages of her children—are included. She uses such facts to create a narrative context. Ulrich places stories of Ballard’s efforts to reach her patients next to the author’s own challenges. She describes the pressures of family life to illustrate the triumph of carving out time for history writing. With all five of her children in the audience, Ulrich tells of the events in their lives that provided a backdrop to writing A Midwife’s Tale. As a part of her overall strategy to integrate the personal with the historical, she knits both streams together through stories.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich always hoped to be a writer and to avoid the dull prose of the historian. Consequently, she uses pithy insights as a rhetorical choice to keep her listeners attention. “Diary keeping,” Ulrich admits, “is a dangerous activity.” Later in the speech, she concludes, “One should never trust a diary.” Ulrich captures the thrill of historical discovery and the disciplined effort needed to make sense of that finding. She does this through the recitation of vivid details from both diaries.

Reaching an audience far beyond Latter-day Saint circles, A Midwife’s Tale exemplifies the turn in scholarship in early American history toward the lives of ordinary folks. That the Bancroft committee asked for an address that was personal and that family members made up the audience allow Ulrich to explore how historians are privileged to have an intimate relationship with the past. What she eloquently shares is not a formulaic acknowledgment. Rather, she recounts her pleasurable relationship with Ballard through silly coincidences, gentle admonishments, and sustaining uplift. Eventually, the address was available on the internet, and Ulrich’s own personal history became a part of the wider history-making process.

When Ulrich received the Bancroft Prize, her scholarship and university teaching had little to do with Latter-day Saint concerns. This was an intentional act, as Ulrich knew the limits of focusing on one religious community in one’s scholarship. Except for an oblique reference to “community service” in her list of “competing demands,” we get no hint of her church activities. So what is Mormon about this acceptance speech?

Keeping in mind the pitfalls of speculating about unspoken religiosity, I venture that “Martha’s Diary and Mine” (and by extension much of Ulrich’s scholarship) echoes Latter-day Saint values in four ways. First, the focus on diaries resonates with a stress on recordkeeping within the Church. Latter-day Saints keep and have kept personal journals. Leaders insist that even the most mundane details of living have meaning, especially to future generations. Second, ritual activities within the Church presume a fluidity between the living and the dead. The living have both the ability and the responsibility to ensure that the dead can progress spiritually. Mormon folklore contains visions, dreams, and uncanny premonitions, all illustrating an enchanted world where the past, present, and future merge. Third, while at times exasperating, families are the foundation for deep happiness and a spiritual necessity. An opposite-sexed spouse and multiple children are a blessing. While A Midwife’s Tale depicts the strange family life of early America, Ulrich portrays her own family as utterly conventional. Finally, the life of the professor and the life of the midwife are both notable for the sheer number of things they do. Plural wife Annie Clark Tanner in her autobiography, A Mormon Mother, suggests, “If Mormon philosophy can be summed up in two words, it is ‘Keep Busy,’ and that applies to every member of the church.”² The two women are constantly on the go. Their ability to manage all this productive activity (and in Ulrich’s case, to win prizes and honors) sets a high bar for the merely mortal. For most of us, reaching that bar will prove elusive, but it is in exerting the effort where the pleasure occurs.

Martha’s Diary and Mine (1991)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich³

I spent eight years studying the diary of Martha Moore Ballard, an eighteenth-century Maine midwife. As I was thinking about how I could explain that to you, I remembered my own diary. It is a pretty miserable affair compared to Martha’s—four ruled notebooks with intermittent entries scattered over fifteen years, but when I went back to read what I had written I was surprised to discover how much it told me about my life with Martha.

My diary entry for April 18, 1982 seems particularly fitting for a Bancroft Acceptance Speech. “The summer should be interesting,” I began, adding that, my husband, Gael, was going to be a full-time parent and househusband in July and August because I had “an NEH summer fellowship to work on Martha Ballard’s diary.” Then I went on to comment on the recent publication of my first book. “Good Wives is out. Except for a short review in the NY Times, silence. Sort of an eery feeling . . . I like Good Wives a lot. Mother likes it. Gael likes it. And [our neighbor] Parker Ayer finds it worth reading. . . . I suppose I am a ways from celestial values. I crave the validation of gushing reviews. A Bancroft Prize would be nice, too.” I honestly have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing, let alone writing it down. Diary keeping is a dangerous activity.

People often ask me how I found Martha Ballard’s diary. The answer is “by accident.” I had gone to the Maine State Archives pursuing an early court case that interested me. I ran out of documents by mid-afternoon, and since Augusta, Maine, is a long way from Durham, New Hampshire, and I didn’t want to waste my trip, I decided to stop in at the adjoining state library to look at two diaries I had seen in a bibliography of women’s history. One turned out to be a ten-page typescript. The other was Martha’s—two fat volumes bound in homemade linen covers. Because I had found so few women’s documents in my research for Good Wives, I was awed by the sheer bulk of it. The faded ink was difficult to read, but in the hour or so before closing I transcribed several pages, enough to form the base for the grant application that gave me the summer fellowship.

Reading my own journals, I was surprised at how soon into the summer research the idea for the book began to form. After a few weeks in Augusta I had arranged to have the diary microfilmed so I could continue the work in Durham. On July 17, 1982, I wrote:

As I was walking home from the UNH library yesterday I suddenly felt I should do a book on the diary. . . . The trick would be to write something more accessible than the diary itself. Is this midwifery or bastardy—to borrow a metaphor from Mrs. Ballard’s world? Am I giving her life to the world or substituting an “illegitimate” book for a real book—hers[?].

The key sentence is probably the next one: “This project appeals to me as a writer.” Fortunately I recognized early on that I was a better storyteller than editor, that I didn’t have the patience or the humility to spend years transcribing a document as massive as this one. I also recognized, I think, that my experience in writing Good Wives allowed me to see things in the diary that other people might not recognize. I had no idea how difficult it would be to actually write the book. “I don’t suppose the historical issues are terribly complex,” I wrote, adding blithely, “This should be about [a] 150 page book—with maps and photographs.”

By August, while Gael was holding things together at home, I was working full-time at the library—reading negative microfilm—white on black. No wonder I sometimes forgot where I was. My diary entry for August 5 begins:

I almost wrote 1782. I am at least ankle deep in Mrs. Ballard’s Book. I have spent a full week now reading microfilm and filling out data sheets. When I came out of the library the other day, it was raining. I knew it would be because I had just been reading about it—the freshet was rising in Mrs. Ballard’s world which had somehow become my own.

In September Gael and I both went back to teaching—and to sharing responsibility for our rambunctious house. Karl, Mindy, and Nathan were away at school, though they liked to show up on weekends and holidays with several friends and occasionally a big black dog. Thatcher was thirteen in 1982; Amy was seven. On February 26, 1983, I wrote:

It gets more & more difficult to write in this journal. The semester is five weeks gone. What a wild month it has been—snow days, flu, and trying to be at school by 9 to lecture to 200 students.

I then follow with a long discussion about Nancy Chodorow’s book The Reproduction of Mothering, which our women’s studies faculty had been discussing.

Must we assume male dominance of the culture because we admit male dominance of those aspects of the culture controlled by men? Suppose we admitted for the sake of argument that motherhood was powerful. Could we find men speaking through women’s language (even in imagination)? What would male culture look like if it were the muted text?

Much of my own diary is in fact about mothering, though at a practical rather than theoretical level. I was surprised, remembering those times, at how upbeat most of the entries really are; a tipoff, of course, that one should never trust a diary. Despite my good humor it is obvious that, like most working parents, Gael and I were stretched in many directions:

June 7, 1983

Saturday I was frantically finishing a review essay for Trends in History. Monday was Memorial Day. Amy marched in the parade in the rain. Gael & I ran a game at the school fair . . . chasing yellow & green tennis balls in a downpour, kids lined up ten deep to take their chances winning a squirt gun. Tuesday & Wednesday I wrote an NEH Grant, got it in the mail just in time to drive to Sanbornton to speak to their historical society.

That NEH Grant, written in a frenzy and dropped at the Durham Post Office thirty seconds before closing, eventually gave me a full year to continue my work on Martha’s diary.

Unfortunately, the grant did not provide a housekeeper and nanny. On December 22, 1984, I wrote in triumph, “I managed to write 30 pages in 10-days,” then added, “I have been writing notes to myself all morning, puttering around among quiet kids with upset tummies. (Please not another virus—though I feel ungrateful after writing about diphtheria all week.)”

I made enough progress during my year’s leave to feel quite confident that I could finish the book before my fiftieth birthday, which then seemed comfortably distant. The goal seemed appropriate, since Martha Ballard began her diary at the age of fifty. I do not need to elaborate the rest of the story. It is familiar to every scholar who attempts to complete a major project in the midst of the competing demands of teaching, family life, and community service. On July 22, 1985, just as my year’s leave was coming to an end, I wrote: “I had nightmares all night that I was in Durham when I was supposed to be in Augusta, in Augusta when supposed to be in Durham!”

At some point in all this a 250-year-old lady took up residence in the loft above my bedroom, alternately cheering me on and chastising me for my lax habits and flagging spirits. She crossed the Kennebec River at the crest of the spring freshet, waded through waist-deep snow, and climbed mountains of ice to reach her patients, and at the age of seventy-seven bent her swollen knees onto the bare back of a pesky horse to reach a woman in travail. How could I complain of my burdens? I’m not sure when I began to call this paragon “Martha” rather than “Mrs. Ballard.” Perhaps I grew less deferent as I began to discover the woman beneath the heroine. Yes, she too occasionally quarreled with her husband, offended her children, and indulged in self-pity.

It was also instructive to discover that even in the eighteenth century a woman could struggle with the double burden of caring for a house and family while doing productive work in her community. Responsible scholarship made me wary of identifying too closely with my subject, but when Martha wrote “some fatigud” (she probably pronounced it “fatagooed”), I knew what she meant. As my stack of notecards and computer files grew, I said less and less about her in my diary, but she is certainly there in my continuing entries about the joys and trials of family life.

Amy had just lost her first tooth when I began my project; now she is taller than I am. During the years we all lived with Martha, our family celebrated high school and college graduations, two weddings, the completion of four PhDs, and the birth of a grandchild. Gael started a new business, took up singing, and went gray. When my eighty-year-old mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, Martha sat with me at the hospital alternately marveling and despairing at the miracles of modern medicine. I survived my own cancer scare and a broken foot, but when I was called to six weeks’ jury duty during a precious summer break, I concluded that Augusta’s eighteenth-century magistrate, Judge North, was pulling strings somewhere in the Great Beyond, trying to prevent me from printing Martha’s description of his trial for raping the minister’s wife.

On July 12, 1988, one day after my fiftieth birthday, I wrote:

50 years old. I’m proud to have survived a half-century. . . . I suppose this is supposed to be a traumatic moment, but in the past five years I’ve reconstructed it into a beginning. Martha’s diary—and therefore her historical life—began at fifty. I’d like to think this can be a beginning, too. . . . Now for Jubilee resolutions. What would I like to begin on this day? Another chapter of Martha’s Book.

Fortunately Martha Ballard’s spirit rather than Joseph North’s prevailed. The book was completed and published just before my fifty-second birthday.

I would like to thank Gael for thirty-three years of loving support and for not insisting that I retrace Martha’s canoe trips on the Kennebec River; my children for computer services and household labor, and for making this project so much more difficult than it might have been and so much more meaningful; my editor, Jane Garrett, for her wisdom and friendship, and for knowing when it was time to get Martha out of my loft and into print; and all those others at Alfred A. Knopf (Mel Rosenthal, Ann Kraybill, Dorothy Baker, and many more) who treated my book so kindly and endured my endless revisions. This evening I owe a special thanks to Columbia University, the Bancroft Prize committee, and all of you for honoring Martha Ballard’s story by listening to mine.

Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, to be published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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Colleen McDannell is Professor of History and Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. A recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a specialist in American religious history. Her most recent book is Catholic Utah. In 2019, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (Oxford University Press) received the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

1. Mary Maples Dunn, “Dialogue: Paradigm Shift Books: A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 3 (2002): 138, https://doi.org/10.1353/ JOWH.2002.0066.

2. Annie Clark Tanner, A Mormon Mother (University of Utah Press, 1969), 207.

3. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Martha’s Diary and Mine,” Journal of Women’s History 4, no. 2, (1992): 157–60, https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2010.0144. Ulrich originally gave the speech when she was accepting the Bancroft Prize at Columbia University on April 3, 1991. This version preserves the final paragraph omitted from the published version but recovered through this online source: “About Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Work on A Midwife’s Tale: 1991 Bancroft Prize Acceptance Speech,” DoHistory, Film Study Center, Harvard University, accessed September 21, 2025, https://dohistory.org/book/100_speech .html.