PBS American Experience A Midwife's Tale 1998

A Midwife's Tale (adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning book)
unfolds like a detective story - the true tale of two women,
two hundred years apart, linked by the diary one of them left behind.
Traditional accounts of the past leave out the lives of ordinary people
because they left so few written records behind - especially the women.

But A Midwife's Tale follows author Laurel Ulrich as she deciphers the
massive but cryptic diary of midwife Martha Ballard. We look though the
eyes of Martha (played by actress Kaiulani Lee), at both the daily and
the shockingly dramatic events that shook her frontier community. We come
to know Martha as the primary healer in her community, coping with births
and deaths, epidemics, her own unruly son, and the judge who has raped the
minister's wife. As we share her struggles to survive in a period of dizzying
social change, intense religious conflict, and economic boom and bust,
we realize that we are witnessing the birth of the modern world in which we live.

A Midwife's Tale reveals the lives of ordinary people, making visible history
that has remained invisible for centuries. It takes us to a world that is
foreign yet strangely familiar.
- Written by Laurie Kahn

A docudrama adaptation of Ulrich's Pulitzer-winning book, which was based on thousands of entries in the journal of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, in the late 1700's and early 1800's. The movie intercuts between reenactments of Ballard doing her Maine midwifery and related tasks, and Ulrich in her eight years of research on her book; in the end, clear comparisons are made between the work of the two women.
- Written by Anonymous