The work of Hallowell, Maine resident Martha Ballard (1735-1812) exemplifies female settlers’ varied and extensive responsibilities. Ballard’s husband, Ephraim, was surveyor and agent for the Kennebec Proprietors, and so generated extensive documentation within its papers. Meanwhile, Martha gave birth to and mothered nine children, managed the daily provisioning of her household and supervised its labors, and performed vital work as a midwife, attending 816 births within 27 years. She recorded these activities in her diary, which contains nearly daily entries spanning from 1775 to 1812.(6) Ensuring the survival of their households and the reproduction of her families and communities, the labor of women including Martha Ballard was an essential complement to the surveys and land sales documented in company records.
Women’s economic activities, in short, undergirded both Wabanaki society and White New England colonists’ investment in and settlement of early Maine.
About the Author
Sara T. Damiano, Ph.D. is a historian of women and gender in early America and the Atlantic World. At the time this essay was written (2022), Prof. Damiano is an assistant professor at Texas State University, with research and course work focused on individuals, especially women, who possessed limited access to formal political and economic power, and who are seldom centered in eighteenth-century historical sources.
Further Reading
Pawling, Micah A. “A “Labyrinth of Uncertainties”: Penobscot River Islands, Land Assignments, and Indigenous Women Proprietors in Nineteenth-Century Maine.” The American Indian Quartertly 42, no.4 (2018): 454-487 muse.jhu.edu/article/708887 (retrieved August 2022).
Endnotes
1. Alice Nash, “The Abiding Frontier: Gender, Family, and Religion in Wabanaki History, 1600-1763” (PhD diss, Columbia University 1997), 148-199.
2. Deposition of Jane and Ann Woodside, May 14, 1738, Microfilm of the Henry Knox Papers, vol. 40, item 31.
3. James Berry and Rachel Berry Deed to Proprietors (1716), Proprietors of the Township of Brunswick: Pejepscot Proprietors Papers, collection 61, vol. 1, p. 81-83, Maine Historical Society.
4. Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1985), 230; James Berry and Rachel Berry Deed to Proprietors (1716), Proprietors of the Township of Brunswick: Pejepscot Proprietors Papers, collection 61, vol. 1, p. 81-83, Maine Historical Society.
5. Ian Saxine, Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 53.
6. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990). Ballard's diary is in the Maine State Library's collections, Ms B B189.