HEAR ME ROAR :

Threads of History : a review of The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Alan Taylor, 03.01.02, New Republic)

Necessity being the mother of scholarly invention, women's historians have proved especially resourceful and ingenious at teasing meanings from stray
references in the records of civil, criminal, and probate courts. Among these adept scholars, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich especially stands out. Ulrich raised a family before turning in midlife to pursue graduate study at a relatively small public university during the late 1970s, and she courageously devoted her dissertation to a topic then doubly damned by conventional scholarly wisdom as trivial: colonial women in northern New England. Surely only someone consigned to academic marginality would investigate marginal people dwelling in marginal places--rather than, say, men in Massachusetts or Virginia. Her early career, in sum, was a path that never before led to the Harvard faculty, to which she now belongs.

But sheer ability is sometimes a stubborn thing. An astute editor at a prestigious publishing house snapped up Ulrich's dissertation, recognizing its literary qualities and its timely contribution to the emerging interest in early American women. When it was published in 1982, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 exemplified a distinctive and authentic new voice in historical scholarship. Trained in the then-prevailing "New Social History," Ulrich dutifully plunged into the court cases and probate inventories of local records to document the lives of common women. But she broke with the social science model that turned statistical averages into bland types, an approach that Ulrich characterizes as "freezing people into a collective anonymity that denies either agency or the capacity to change."

Instead, in obscure records she found vivid stories that illuminated the lives led by so-called "common" people. Determined to evoke the past as well as to analyze it, Ulrich offered "an extended description constructed from a series of vignettes." And she found drama where no one else had bothered to look, presenting "much about housekeeping, childbearing, and ordinary churchgoing, about small conflicts experienced by forgotten women, and about little triumphs that history has not recorded." Although attentive to scholarly questions--such as whether colonial women were losing or gaining in status--Ulrich primarily sought to recover what mattered to past women: "the magnification of motherhood, the idealization of conjugal love, and the elevation of female religiosity." With a humane imagination and a keen eye for telling details, Ulrich enabled readers to feel a sense of connection to kindred people dwelling in the alien culture of a distant time, bringing into focus a surprisingly coherent and forceful picture of colonial life.

Eight years later, in 1990, Ulrich published a still more eloquent, moving, and important book, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. As in her first book, she took on a risky subject rejected by more conventional historians: the life of an obscure woman from central Maine who left a long but repetitive and cryptic diary. Full of daily chores and transactions but thin on observation, the diary seemed dry, dull, and trivial to the few historians who bothered to examine its cramped handwriting. Through innovative and exhaustive research in local records, Ulrich reconstituted Martha Ballard's familial, social, and economic relationships with hundreds of neighbors--children, women, and men--to restore the rich meanings implicit in the diary's terse entries.

Recast as an "earnest, steady, gentle, and courageous record," the diary revealed the long-lost life of a country village in the early republic. Ballard's diary helped Ulrich to uncover the vibrant female networks for exchanging labor and making household produce, including homespun cloth. Eighteenth-century women re-appeared as earthy, vibrant, and essential, and no longer as the passive dependents of stereotype. In a vivid and telling metaphor, Ulrich likened the social interplay of men and women to cloth:
"Think of the white threads as women's activities, the blue as men's, then imagine the resulting social web. Clearly, some activities in an eighteenth-century town brought men and women together. Others defined their separateness." No historian has done more to recover a detailed sense of the past from so many disparate scraps of apparently opaque evidence.

Striking as literature and as research, A Midwife's Tale presents Ulrich's findings in a lyrical prose attentive to a reader's imagination. By focusing each chapter on a particularly difficult but implicitly rich passage, Ulrich drew her readers into the challenges and the rewards of historical research as detective work. She then constructed tight and compelling descriptions of action and place in a distant time and culture, rendering tangible the differentness of the early republic. And yet Ulrich also treats her subjects with empathy, rendering them understandable as fellow humans in their abilities and limits, their joys and sorrows. While feeling the alienation of time, readers of her book also garner a sense of kinship with the people who lived in the distant past. No book in recent memory has better combined the respect of fellow scholars with the affection of general readers.

One of the central conceits of feminism is that women up until modern times must have been content to lead lives of powerlessness and despair, completely subjugating themselves to the whims of their husbands, fathers, and sons. Take a look at your grandmothers, your Mom, your wife, your sister, your daughter...and ask yourself what the likelihood is that, even in a patriarchal society, they would have led lives of utter emptiness, devoid of any meaning, with no influence on the world around them. Not very likely, is it? Posted by Orrin Judd at April 29, 2002 8:34 AM