Martha Ballard
We as a society are fortunate. We have the luxury of advanced technology to include: computers, telephones, video teleconferencing equipment, cellular phones, beepers, and hospitals with the latest gadgets and gizmos. Our technology is available only because of documented historical accounts. Our idea of work is having to get in our vehicles and driving to our destination and sometimes sitting behind a desk all day to push paper; the worst any of us suffers is a traffic jam here or there or worse, a construction site. Imagine life in the late eighteenth century. People in this era had to deal with not only getting up at dawn to milk the cows, but toiling for hours on end with animals that refused to budge. Individuals in this era did not have the luxury of using the technological tools we have today. They could not pull out their cell phones if the mule decided to have a bad day or if they injured themselves on the job. Achieving prosperity was not easily done! during this century. The demands placed upon them, required that farmers and merchants work endlessly to provide for their families. Through our education, we have learned that farmers worked and played very hard. We are not however, taught in great detail the vital r
Martha's diary supports the notion that children chose their own spouses and that premarital sex did indeed exist (Ulrich, 138). They could not rely on the technology available to us today. Her pride and her emotional well-being prevented her from reaching out (Ulrich, 278). Martha allowed her profession to decline because of the massive duties she had to perform at home. This entry tells of the relationship she had with one of her sons. Martha Ballard, a woman that is not generally listed in history books, played a vital role in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This diary allows us to catch a rare glimpse of family events, visits to neighbors, dangerous river crossings, childbirth, weather highlights, public scandals and ordinary workaday doings in the plain, quaint words of the person who lived or observed them The seemingly trivial becomes fraught with meaning in the skilled hands of this historian and what history texts typically make abstract is returned to concrete form here (Banas, 1262). Her great-great granddaughter, Mary Hobart was a pioneer in medicine who was inspired by the stories she heard about her grandmother (Ulrich, 347). They also did not have the luxury of sleeping in or putting off the chores. Despite her public reputation as a self-sacrificing "angel of the battlefield," she was a conscious feminist, a lifelong supporter of women's rights and women's suffrage. Perhaps it was a sense of history or a craving for stability, perhaps only a practical need to keep birth records, that first motivated Martha to keep a diary. These laws still exist in today's society as Child Support. I have brot wood from the old fence above here to boil potatoes for son Jonathans swine.
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