ABSTRACT
Mme Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray was unique, for she was a political midwife, a public figure. Most work to date, whether prosopographical or biographical, gives us an insight into midwives whose experiences were rather like those of others, who functioned in the private sphere and whose examples can be generalized. Martha Ballard of A Midwife’s Tale, for instance, was a kind of ‘everywoman’, in the sense that each town had one or several such practitioners. This is not to say that Ballard was a common or ordinary personin fact she was exceptional in the number of deliveries she attended and in keeping a record-but rather that her work, her comings and goings, her functions in the town and the way she was regarded and counted on, were patterns that repeated and played themselves out in the lives of many other contemporary New England midwives. The importance of Martha Ballard’s story is precisely that it is representative of a broader phenomenon: it suggests the general contours of the lives of colonial women cast in this role. Hers mirrors the experience of many, perhaps hundreds, of others.1
