A biography based on the annual of Martha Ballard, housewife, midwife, healer, who lived in and around the Kennebec River towns of Hallowell and Augusta, Maine, gives a rare picture of ordinary life in preindustrial America.
The life of Martha Ballard, a frontier midwife in Maine, is reconstructed through her diary. She lived through the economic boom and bust, and political and social turmoil of the decades following the American Revolution.