Iowa Public Television

American Experience

A Midwife's Tale (#1003)

From the late 1700s to the early 1800s, Martha Moore Ballard provided medicinal care and midwifery services to the remote town in Maine in which she lived. Every day, until her death in 1812, Martha kept a diary of her experiences as a midwife, a member of her family and a citizen of her community. In the 1980s, after eight years of intense and extensive research of the document, author and historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich began to realize the importance of the diary and how it captured the way people lived in the early years of the United States. The resulting book, "A Midwife's Tale" became a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In a powerful dramatic film, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents "A Midwife's Tale" and reveals how one woman faced the economic changes, and political and social turmoil of the decades following the American Revolution. [86 minutes]

This episode has not aired in the past few months on Iowa Public Television.