The Frozen River review: Enjoy, but don't believe

Ariel Lawhon's new bestseller is exactly what it aimed to be, another book in which women heroically oppose bad men. You can enjoy it--I did--but don't believe it. Here's why, in too many words.

First things first, I enjoyed The Frozen River, Ariel Lawhon’s latest book club-bound bestseller. I loved her attempt to bring the life of one of my long-standing favorite matriarchs, Martha Ballard, to the minds and hearts of modern readers. And I liked how she created a murder from scratch to situate Martha’s real life comfortably within the whodunnit historical novel genre. My kudos to her for what will surely be one of her most financially successful books.

While I enjoyed it, I did not believe it. And neither should you. In this review I will spoil the book in two ways. First, I’m going to discuss some big plot reveals, so you have been warned. But second, I’m going to spoil the whole idea of historical novel writing in general and Lawhon’s attempt at this historical novel specifically. Or rather, I’m going to point out the ways in which she spoils the book herself.

Look, let’s be clear, I can enjoy her book and admire her success but still be critical of her work. Criticizing the work doesn’t mean I’m being critical of her. Questioning the decisions that she made doesn’t mean I’m questioning her right to make them. If I’m up front, one of the reasons I intend to do all this spoiling is that I’m a bit miffed. Martha Ballard was my heroine long before Ariel Lawhon heard of her. I’m the librarian who in the 1990s went to a College Town session where one of my all-time favorite academic writers, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—a true matriarch whom I have already written about on this fledgling substack—presented on her 1990 book, A Midwife’s Tale, and shared her actual insights about the real Martha Ballard without inventing or overlooking a single shred of her fascinating life.

So yes, I’m like that kid into alternative music in the 80s who discovered Depeche Mode before People are People and was at least a bit annoyed when that poseur Annie Squires suddenly told everybody she looooved De-PEH-chee Mode so much though she couldn’t be bothered to actually know how to pronounce it. That sounds oddly specific for good reason. And it’s for that reason I wanted to be upfront about my issues. As I said, I’m miffed that Lawhon only accidentally discovered Martha Ballard’s story two decades after I did though admittedly I discovered Martha Ballard two decades after Ulrich did so we’re even. I’m not saying I’m a saint. Apologies to Annie Squires, but for the record it was also pronounced In-Excess, not Inks. Another oddly specific reference and my last one. For today.

The trouble with kids’ historical novels today

Historical novels are impossible to pull off. There are three modes of historical fiction: a) try and fail to do it well; b) sin boldly; and c) sin boldly but lie about it. Without giving you my long and sordid history of reading historical novels, I’ll offer exemplars: a = Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard, b = Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith, c = The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

There are many such examples but these three stand out. Ballard’s book does its best to present life during World War II in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. There will always be things you can critique about it (see the above “historical novels are impossible,” point), but it doesn’t alter the basic facts of history even as it weaves fictional elements into a reflection of real life. Grahame-Smith’s genius paranormal work about Abraham Lincoln is exactly what I claimed above: a bold-faced but enjoyable lie. The real sticky spot is c (the c-spot?), exemplified best by The Da Vinci Code. If you loved that book and don’t want to hear even valid criticisms of it, stop reading now.

I enjoyed Brown’s preposterous tale as well. I even watched the movie (It was Tom Hanks galivanting around the world being a symbologist, so sue me!). But as a work of historical fiction, I absolutely hated it. Why? Because Brown broke a cardinal rule: He lied about his book. On the title page, he claims that the facts of the book are true. In repeated television interviews he made claims that besides his fictional characters, all of the history, “99 percent of it is true. All of the architecture, the art, the secret rituals, the history, all of that is true.” (CNN interview, 2003).

Sigh. Dear reader, Dan Brown lied to you. His book was riddled with embarrassingly obvious inventions, outrageous conjurations, and deliberate concoctions. He lied to you and he knew he was lying to you. He lied to you because he knew many of you would believe it and it would lead to his book’s stupendous success. I am a librarian—I believe fiction can be true in a very important sense. But a liar is a liar and Dan Brown was a liar.

My friends, I am here to say that Ariel Lawhon is also a liar.

I don’t hate her for it. I don’t think she knows she’s a liar or that she and I would agree on the definition of what is a liar. She had no reason to know that thanks to Dan Brown this librarian decided years ago to let historical fiction writers do whatever they want to even real historical figures, regardless of my prior feelings for said historical figures, as long as they didn’t lie about it.

Arial Lawhon’s lies are modest and they are forgivable by most people’s standards, but they are still lies.

Don’t believe Lawhon’s Big Lies, but enjoy the small ones

At issue is Lawhon’s author’s note, the part at the end of the book where she explains to her readers that her book is 75 percent true, even as she admits she had to invent most of it from whole cloth. Fiction writers must invent things, I bear her no grudge for this. In particular, they must invent motivations and modes of interaction for characters that they have adapted from real people or at least real circumstances. In so doing, they are choosing to create a world where their characters do things, say things, think things, feel things that paint a picture of life in a particular time.

Invariably, they end up painting a picture of life in their own time. Specifically, and increasingly so for women today, they end up painting idealized versions of themselves or their readers situated in the past. This is also just fine; if we women are particularly drawn to imagine ourselves in the past, free from our modern pressures and stresses but still possessing our modern sensibilities and notions of empowerment, how does it hurt anyone if we imagine ourselves, when faced with the impossible trials of yesteryear as having the courage to be forthright, commanding, (the ever-important) independent, and (when needed) murderous?

Yes, we flocked (like sheep, not birds) to read Where the Crawdads Sing because we longed to see ourselves in that past. Sexually desired by the most popular boy in our bayou town (more spoilers coming, so, um, you are warned?). We wanted to imagine that we were so naturally gifted that even despite our abusive upbringing and impoverished circumstances our amazing intuneness with nature would bring out many splendid virtues that only a sensitive young man who doesn’t want to sexually exploit us would see and admire. And that as we grew we would feel obligated to take revenge for our sexual abuse into our own hands and not only kill the offending party but get away with it because we’re so darn smart!

I loved that book. But I was under no illusions as to why I loved that book. And I hope that me pointing out that you will love Martha Ballard’s story, as envisioned by Lawhon, for similar reasons, does not hurt your feelings. Of all the lies in The Frozen River, this truth I cannot deny: We love it when authors pander to our most self-reverential cravings.

Tiny lies don’t matter much

I enjoy reading historical fiction about time periods I don’t know much about. But because I also read such books about time periods I know obscenely well, I know that all of them suffer from the kinds of gentle anachronisms like those peppered throughout Lawhon’s book. She is not to blame. Frankly, I only know some of these things because I read. too. much. And care too much. These tiny lies include things like:

• A scene where Ballard instructs a mother to nurse her baby and sees the woman “unbutton her blouse.” The novel is set in 1789 in a part of Massachusetts that is today Maine (Maine would not be a state until 1820). In this time period women’s clothing did not feature buttons. Not at all, not their outerwear, their cloaks, nor their undergarments. And they did not wear blouses, not for another 100 years. American women in this era and specifically in this region wore shifts, large under garments that they wore all day and all night long, layering them up and down as needed for different activities. They were wide at the neck, tight on the arms, and billowed down to the thighs. They generally had no fastening element though occasionally they had a draw string to tighten or loosen the opening as would have likely been the case for a nursing baby in Ballard’s time. You pull that thing open and pull your breast over the top. No buttons needed!

• A scene where a sexual offender unlaces his trousers. Similar to the above, men in this era did not wear trousers, they wore breeches. This is not even slightly up for debate, especially in 1789. Twenty years later it would be possible for a man to sport trousers in Maine. But it would never be laced up—it would have a fall-front opening that buttons (men may not have worn the “trousers” in the family, but they wore all the buttons). I personally find this sexy and if I could get my man to let me hand-sew him a colonial New England outfit and wear it to match my hand-sewn colonial shift, petticoats, gown, stomacher, and jacket, I assure you he would get more action.

• A scene where Ballard overhears young women gossiping about a pregnant unmarried woman in the general store. This scene is crucial to the plot and establishes some things necessary to understand about the time period. But it’s rife with gentle anachronisms such as the idea that the general store had aisles with shelves that customers could peruse. They did not—customers presented at the counter and asked for goods that shopkeepers would retrieve from storage for inspection. In the scene Ballard also looks at a price tag and considers the price too much. Price tags were unnecessary in the general store of this time period, especially because customers could not browse items unaided.

• Ballard describes a young woman as looking like a cherub in a Renaissance painting. The Renaissance may have happened from 1300 to 1600, but the term wasn’t used in English to describe that time period for another forty years and wasn’t widely used to refer to the period until another thirty years after that. Not to mention that it’s unlikely that Martha Ballard would ever have seen a Renaissance painting in her life, much less known to call it that.

• Ballard and the other women in the book curse frequently. I know that in today’s world women consider cursing like a man a badge of courage. Women two generations before Ballard would have considered swearing by heaven or hell akin to blasphemy, as the Bible warns. It is likely women of Ballard’s era held their tongues to a higher standard than we do today. Especially taking the lord’s name in vain (this includes referring to God as a “great Parent of the universe” as she often did in her diaries probably to avoid too-oft use of the sacred name). I will admit I have not found concurrence among writers on the time period regarding this point. Some like to imagine these earthy, less sophisticated rural colonists to be saltier than the Boston educated elite. I can’t say with confidence. It is safe to assume that the swearing that women do in the book is exaggerated, perhaps to a minor degree, or to a major one as I believe. One specific case is Ballard’s use (in Lawhon’s writing) of the phrase “hell for leather.” We know she wouldn’t have said this because it wasn’t coined for nearly another century when Rudyard Kipling first introduced it into the language.

• Ballard and her husband demonstrate an in-depth familiarity with Shakespeare. Forgive me for picking this nit, because I really enjoyed Lawhon’s use of Shakespeare in this book, Like softest music to attending ears! It’s just that it wouldn’t have happened. Shakespeare’s plays were owned by some of the brightest men of Martha’s generation, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington himself. But the Bard’s work was not commonly known (nor was he commonly known as the Bard) in New England in that time for the very specific reason that Puritans—whose descendant Martha Ballard was—believed stage plays to be sinful. There are many fun anecdotes I could relate here, including some that involve the opening months of the Revolutionary War, where one of the complaints Boston colonials had against British loyalists was their penchant for theater. But more significant an explanation for why Martha Ballard and her husband would not have known Shakespeare’s work, certainly not in the detail suggested in the book, is that they didn’t read much other than the Bible and the occasional newspaper. I’ll discuss this more below in a context of a lie that does matter.

There are more such immaterial and gentle anachronisms. The use of the word “bias,” references to couples dancing in pairs (the plot actually turns on this one, pun intended), the practice of timing intervals between contractions in seconds, and even the structure of houses in the day and the typical sleeping arrangements of family members within them. But none of these matter much and shouldn’t put a damper on your enjoyment of this book.

The Three Lies You Should Disbelieve

There are three lies that I feel duty bound to inform you of. Because they are flat out wrong, yes, because they are slanderous, yes, but because Lawhon has gone to great lengths in her author’s note and in her media interviews to repeat these lies. And I think our foremothers deserve better. Buckle up.

Big Lie #1: Martha Ballard was a #metoo pioneer

Martha was not a courageous anti-rape activist. Indeed, when I first read Ulrich’s book about Ballard, I struggled with this one and had some time ago attempted to put it on a mental shelf and let it gather dust. Until Lawhon decided to write about it in such a way that I could not hide from this truth. And now you can’t either.

(Spoiler here): The book revolves around the rape of one woman, the pastor’s wife, Rebecca Foster. In Lawhon’s retelling, the courageous and amazing Martha Ballard (a one-dimensional know it all, evidently, per The Frozen River) recognizes right away that she’s facing a #metoo moment and has to storm forward in bringing to light the terrible fact that one of Foster’s accused assailants was a local magistrate. It’s admittedly a great plot device. Powerful local man brutalizes a vulnerable woman, and the rising feminist midwife—naturally in tune with womanhood as she is by virtue of her profession—must stand forth boldly, damn the consequences.

Except, of all the things we don’t know about the rape accusation—and we really don’t know much at all other than the scant amount the real Ballard wrote down ahead of delivering her testimony in court—one thing we do know is that Ballard herself told Foster not to tell anyone about the accusation. In her words:

The 16 instant I called to mind Mrs Foster saying Colonel North had positively had unlawful concors with a woman which was not his wife and I begd her never to mentin it to any other person. I told her shee would Expose & perhaps ruin her self if shee did. (Ballard’s journal, transcribed by Ulrich)

Ouch, that hurts. My modern womanhood shrinks to consider a matriarch—Ballard was in her 50s and was by all rights a kind of Elder Stateswoman of the town’s female society—telling a young woman to keep a sexual assault to herself. Or did she?

The challenge of discerning what happened to Rebecca Foster and what Ballard should have done about it rests squarely on the nature of Ballard’s journal. It was not a journal so much as a register of her daily tasks, including details of her deliveries as a midwife. She did not speculate about motives or actions of other people. She barely showed any emotion in those pages. Even in a time where gothic novels were becoming a genre—a Romantic-era staple that regularly portrayed emotionalized women subject to the passions of men, often laden with moralizing warnings—Ballard was just recording cold, hard facts. And omitting many as well.

The truth of Rebecca Foster’s sexual assaults is that we don’t know what happened in them, who did what, and how much Ballard knew. Rebecca first complained to Ballard of something that happened involving North nine or ten days after the date Rebecca would later claim the rape against him. But it was at least an indirect enough accusation that it’s not clear that Ballard understood it was Rebecca claiming any actual assault against her person. The first claim was that she “had received great abuses from people unknown to her,” including throwing stones at her windows, striving to get into the home to “lodge” with her—a common euphemism in the time for “have sex with” much as we would say “sleep” with today. It’s only later that Rebecca’s story expanded to add details, finally reporting that of the three men named, at least North managed to enter the house and have “unlawful concors (sic)” with her, not some third woman as Rebecca originally intimated.

It is in the middle of this increasing range of accusations that Ballard told her neighbor “never to mentin (sic) it to any other person.” Perhaps she would have responded differently if she knew more details. Perhaps not. After all, Judge North was an influential and powerful man—her own family’s living depended on regular interaction with North.

To be clear, in the novel, Lawhon makes it much easier to tell what happened. In her fictionalized tale, Lawhon has Ballard inspect the bruises and tearing caused by the violent rape. Had anything like this happened in real life, perhaps Ballard would have responded differently. But it didn’t. And I don’t consider this fabrication of Lawhon her Big Lie. You have to make the story interesting and this is one way to make it so, and also to justify the retribution that unfolds in the plot as a result. A simple he-said, she-said #metoo story wouldn’t set up the circumstances for a mysterious murder, for example.

The Big Lie that apparently Lawhon believes is that Rebecca Foster was gang-raped on three occasions in a single week. Not in her story—she actually removed one accused rapist altogether from her version—but in real life. I first didn’t believe that Lawhon could have come to this conclusion and thought I was misinterpreting her author’s note. But no, it’s right there:

...in Martha's diary, those three men sexually assaulted Rebecca Foster three different times over the course of one week. What is portrayed as horrific here was in fact a series of nine unspeakable assaults in real life. (page 421)

This is manifestly not the case. Martha’s diary and the original court complaint against the three men alleges no such thing. Together, they specifically accuse three men of attempted ravishment or rape on three separate occasions, with specific dates assigned to the allegations against each man individually. Furthermore, only in North’s trial are we given any firm claim that North specifically abused or raped her by his unlawful concourse with her.

The historian’s heart cries out for more information about the case, for Rebecca Foster’s sake if for no other reason. But the historian’s heart also cries foul for Lawhon so deliberately misreading the thin evidence. There was not even a single gang rape alleged, much less three separate incidents.

I don’t imagine many people will care enough to point this out to her. And I assume, especially given the wild success she has had with the novel, that she will justify her interpretation of the facts. It’s easier to do so; but I think it’s unnecessary to do so. One could simply say, “Something terrible and wrong happened here, we don’t know what it was, so I have fabricated a fictional account.” I would still have issues (see below), but they would not be nearly as heated as they are by this fear-mongering idea that an innocent woman was brutalized by three men repeatedly and nobody in town did a single thing about it. Believing that version of events is a choice, one that we should resist in our reading of history, even if we give into it in fiction.

In the world of today, where we claim to Believe All Women, even when we know that not all women should be believed, it’s difficult to wrestle with Martha Ballard’s strong encouragement that Rebecca just keep it to herself for this reason. And of course in real life one of the accused did attempt to defend himself by defaming Rebecca Foster’s character, as real rapists surely would do. We cannot shrink from that in reading the history.

But since we are inventing fiction here, I think Lawhon missed an opportunity that is due in our culture. We so recently rampaged self-righteously across social media, tarring any man who any woman claimed had done even the slightest unsavory deed (the sad tale of Aziz Ansari comes to mind), that maybe it’s time for us to sit with and struggle on this for a bit. As Ballard maybe did to some degree, or a fictional Ballard certainly could. What role did Rebecca as her own agent play in this occurrence? What range of responses did fictional Ballard pass through and how were they affected by her own fictional history? This story is ripe for it.

Ulrich was certainly open to it, though she was writing decades before #metoo. Like the good historian she is, she suggests possible interpretations of the evidence, including the possibility that Foster had consensual relations with at least one of the men in question, got pregnant, and then converted the complaint to an “attempted ravishment” charge to exonerate herself given that her husband was away in Boston for the period wherein she would have gotten pregnant. Somebody had to be the father (we’ll talk about that more in a bit), and claiming rape makes it easier to avoid adultery, which was a criminal offense not to mention a shaming one.

That’s the most painful possible explanation and it’s not one I like. But it’s one that a fictional Martha Ballard could have at least considered, wrestled with, explored in her own mind, advising Rebecca to be quiet about events for reasons that she would later rethink and decide to repent of. That’s a Martha Ballard who is fallible, which also makes her capable of growth. Two things that Lawhon’s Ballard never experiences. And the book is poorer because of it.

(Another spoiler coming). In what I think is a powerful move by Lawhon, Ballard herself turns out to have been the victim of a sexual assault which shaped her entire life, from the husband who eventually married her to her repeated assertion that she “has seen a man hanged,” before. This is clever plotting. I’m totally okay with this one. What I am not okay with, however, is the lie that Lawhon adds in her author’s note, where she explains why she felt justified in inventing a history of sexual assault for Ballard: “…there is a 33 percent chance of its being true.”

Evidently Lawhon believes that one-third of women experienced sexual assault in colonial New England and that this number is still true today. It wasn’t and it isn’t. Of course it’s impossible to determine the actual rate of sexual assault then, and it’s not much easier to do so today. But it is possible to rule out numbers as high as 33 percent. The most commonly repeated lie in today’s “rape culture” discourse is that 1 in 5 women will experience sexual assault in their lives, a number President Obama used and was repeated often after that. That number would be outrageous if it were true, but it’s only true if we add up every possible type of sexualization a woman experiences—ranging from being kissed without permission or pinched on the butt to being forcibly penetrated but also to a woman who consents to have sex or even initiates it and then later regrets it for whatever reason. These are not similar things. I understand that it is the current fashion to say that all of these things matter at the same level in order to preach to young women that they are constantly under threat. If you morally believe preaching fear is important, you can do so. But you are lying about it.

The gang rape that Lawhon depicts in her book is not on the same spectrum as being kissed without first having been asked if you want to be kissed. Claiming that a rape of this degree—or even one of a lesser degree that the fictionalized Ballard suffered as a young woman—is something 33 percent of women have experience with is absurd. Rape has been a human constant and, sadly, we will always have to deal with it. But the need to imagine it’s common and widespread says more about our female strategy for survival as the weaker sex than it does about the actual incidence of rape. More on that later.

Big Lie #2: Women were kept illiterate to keep them down

In The Frozen River, Martha Ballard is taught by her generous husband to read. As Lawhon has repeated in nearly every interview I’ve ever read, women of Ballard’s day were not taught to read and write. But Ballard had a special gift which she used to compile her journals and she even taught a girl in her town to read to further the gift.

Except it’s not true. The fact is, New England women were some of the most literate of all women anywhere on earth. This is undisputed and it’s true for one main reason: the Puritan founders of New England believed that all men and women were required to have a personal relationship with scripture, which was the primary means of achieving grace necessary to salvation. (Here’s a weird note that Lawhon could have used somewhere in her book—Puritans held the radical belief that women had souls a century before Anglicans concurred!) In contrast with Catholic doctrine, which taught that the sacraments of the church were necessary and sufficient to get you into heaven, the Calvinist doctrine that underlay all Puritan beliefs was that familiarity with Holy Scripture was necessary to sanctification and justification before God, not the church and its sacraments. Thus, Puritan women could all read the Bible, going back to the early 1600s. New England women, then, right up to 1789, were all expected to read the Bible, even though Puritanism had waned considerably and had broken down into quarrels between the stern Congregationalists who continued in Calvinist belief and the Unitarians like Rebecca Foster’s husband who used scripture to argue that God loved his children more liberally than hardcore Calvinism allowed. The cultural practice of teaching young women to read in the 1600s had remained largely in tact throughout the 1700s.

What women couldn’t do very well was write. Today we think literacy includes both reading and writing, but back then it didn’t need to. You only needed to be able to read the Bible, and even that in printed editions. Most people couldn’t read cursive handwriting (funny how that’s coming full circle today), largely because they didn’t need to write in long, flowing hand. Most people only needed to be able to write their name, scribble a few things in ledgers or records books, and that was that. Most women did not have professions that required longhand writing. Martha Ballard’s profession did not require it either. But having grown up in a very educated household in Oxford, Massachusetts, Ballard and other women in her family learned to write, surpassing their own mother who could sign her name only poorly.

But here’s the shocker: Most men in this era did not write in longhand either. Because most of them didn’t need to. There are famous Boston merchants of the era who left prodigious scribblings in the margins of their account books and ledgers, they were the exception. But the rule they all held to, the same rule Ballard lived by, was that when it came to writing longhand, you could write as you saw fit. Spell how you wanted, change the spellings of proper names even in the same entry. No standardized approach to paragraphing, line breaks, or punctuation existed. In this regard, very few people in Ballard’s day, even in the bustling town of Boston with its whopping population of over 10,000 souls! were capable of both reading and writing. Mandatory schooling that would essentially lift 90 percent of New England children into reading and writing fluency would happen just decades after Ballard’s life ended. But even that was built on the back of a strong local custom of widespread reading.

I’m not disappointed that Lawhon gave Ballard and her husband a tender background of him sharing the gift of literacy with her. But I am disappointed that Lawhon so shamelessly repeats the claim that back then “most women could not read or write” and nearly every reviewer has repeated this fact when it is just wrong. Maybe Lawhon could have had Ephraim, Martha’s husband, insist on teaching her to be a careful writer, maybe Martha could have gone through an early life event that caused her to stubbornly insist on documenting her own life. Maybe something other than, “women were not taught to read or write.”

Here again, the missed opportunity is that of looking for the unique motivations that made Ballard do something that other women did not do. Instead of repeating over and over the claim that big, bad men tried to keep poor, vulnerable women down by denying them access to the written word.

Big Lie #3: Young women were routinely fined or jailed for fornication

If you have gotten this far, you have basically read the equivalent of 20 pages of a tightly formatted novel. I applaud you but I also apologize. As put by Benjamin Franklin, “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”

To thank you, I will make this one brief though there is an entire book one could write about it. One thing Lawhon does in The Frozen River that I applaud is her careful presentation of the role of the midwife in taking declarations of paternity during childbirth. This was a crucial role that Ballard and other midwives played and had played for over a century. That this was done in the mistaken belief that a woman, in the throes of childbirth, would be compelled to tell the truth about who the father of the child is (or “swear a child on him”) is well presented. And, let’s give credit where it’s due, Martha Ballard did genuinely record her future daughter-in-law’s swearing out a child on her own son, Jonathan. Lawhon’s inclusion of this bit was very well done, especially because Jonathan’s character in the book is deftly woven throughout the novel in such a way that you do not suspect his actual role in the events of the novel because he has been so carefully worked into the day-to-day activities commented on by Ballard. Kudos are deserved for that one, especially so because the real Jonathan was a bit of a challenge to Ballard throughout her life, both in this period and for the next two decades right to the end of her life, together with his wife Sally, the same woman who swore her first child on him and later became his wife.

The drama surrounding this act as presented in the book and in the many reviews I have read, however, misses some important context. Childbed confessions of paternity are presented in the book as a way to catch and punish young women for their unchastity. This is described as a way to unfairly punish women for their sexual wandering while giving men a free pass. It’s actually quite a bit more complicated than that and though I can’t present the whole history here, I just want to register that you should not so easily fall into the trap of believing that every old practice relating to women was done to hurt them. There was no patriarchy controlling young women’s sexuality, keeping them constrained while allowing men to cheat and philander.

In truth, for the 40 years prior to the events of the novel, sexuality of young people had been going through a dramatic revolution. Lawhon is aware of this as she comments on it in her author’s note, citing Ulrich’s careful calculation that nearly 40 percent of “first births” Ballard delivered for women were conceived out of wedlock. But she doesn’t seem to realize that this was a general phenomenon and that it wasn’t very much frowned on or gossiped about at the time. In other New England towns similar numbers have been observed, usually in the 30-40 percent range. But only for the back half of this particular century before the numbers trended back down, and were clamped down on later during the Victorian era, an era much more concerned with controlling the dangerous sexuality of young women than the Revolutionary War period in America.

The reason had less to do with a loosening of sexual morality than with the lack of heritable property for sons of newly established colonial families. I promised to be brief, but to really make this point, I have to explain that contrary to what many people think, colonial life in 1700s New England was actually quite health-inducing. Ephraim Ballard, Martha’s husband, lived into his 80s. Death rates, including maternal deaths in childbirth and infant deaths in the same, were lower in New England in the time than they would be across the US even 100 years later. (In fact, average US maternal deaths per 1,000 would not get back down to the level of rural colonial New England’s until the 1940s, to gratefully plummet thereafter.)

In her author’s note, Lawhon comments on Martha Ballard’s incredibly low rate of maternal death as if it made her special. Though she mistakenly repeats the claim that Ballard delivered 1,000 babies without a single maternal death, this is only true if you exclude mothers who died after childbirth, during recovery, which included 5 women, still a very low number, but comparable to other midwives and physicians in New England. For child deaths, the region’s children were also very fortunate—Ballard recorded 20 neonatal deaths, a rate of about 2.5 per 1,000, common for her time and place. And significantly lower than in London, Dublin, or other European capitals, where rates of these things could be much higher.

These are probably lower mortality numbers than you imagined. None of this needed to figure into Lawhon’s book or even her thinking. But my point is this: Fertility was exceedingly high among these very healthy people. Families routinely had between 7 and 12 children. Even with terrible epidemics—the Ballards lost three daughters to diphtheria, which Lawhon included in the narrative very deftly—families in this region routinely brought more children to adulthood than we do today by a long shot. Add to that regular immigration from Europe and it is one primary scarcity that drove the evolution of community life in this period, including premarital sexual activity: the lack of farmable land.

A man who acquired 100 acres of farmable land, even if he was able to clear it all of lumber and drain all the bogs, would not have enough land to give even two sons a meaningful inheritance, much less four or five sons. Without land on which to establish a family, young couples were delaying marriage by many years, often on the advice or admonition of parents who wished to get them set up well before they entered the period of “housekeeping” as newlyweds. A large land grant was also an inducement to marriage for a young woman from a prominent family, the kind of family whose wealth and holdings could improve the influence of the suitor if he were successful. All of this scheming I’m describing was not even among the kinds of wealth people read about from Gilded Age gazillionaires. I’m just talking about 50 acres and a log cabin.

Since parental approval of marriage wasn’t forthcoming, many young couples simply took, er, matters, into their own hands. Literally. And then into, well, you know. In the intervening nine months, whether the young woman made a paternity claim early—basically admitting to fornication—or waited until her birth to swear a child on the father, was a function of how much the couple had planned the whole ordeal or simply gave in because they couldn’t wait.

Because it is in the interest of the community that children have fathers—a fact that is true today though we try to hide from it in our discourse—the laws were set up to ensure that young women, considered the ones with more at stake, would have proper motivation to confess their “sin” and accuse the guilty male. This meant that old laws that were still on the books that were originally intended to punish women (and men, originally, though those laws were removed or less likely to be enforced after about 1750) for the ghastly sin of fornication, were left on the books in order to ensure that young couples would be honest in their actions with the community.

A young man would generally avoid fornicating with a young woman he didn’t want to be held accountable for, though of course this also happened. In such cases, she could swear a child on him in childbirth, a midwife would report that to the magistrate as a kind of “witness” under long-standing law, and the man could be summoned to account for himself. If he agreed to marry the girl, the charges of fornication and bastardy were dropped. If he did not, she could sue for maintenance. This was considered a community matter because without maintenance an unwed mother with a child would put a burden on the community, possibly requiring support of the church.

In Ballard’s time, these things did occur, but only rarely. Just 7 single women she delivered declined to give a name. Most children conceived before marriage were claimed before birth, and most of the remaining were claimed shortly thereafter. Her son Jonathan’s case was one of the latter. In Martha Ballard’s day, prosecutions of women for fornication had ceased completely. Even though the laws were still on the books and would be for some time. Instead of facing prosecution, when young women confessed to the sin of fornication during childbirth, they did so as part one of a two-step process for initiating a request for maintenance at the hands of the father. The fact that a woman in theory could be fined six shillings for this confession as part of this process was actually a way of reducing the severity of the charge, because such a confession could be heard privately by a single justice of the peace rather than be taken as a formal charge to the Court of General Sessions which was more public and potentially more humiliating. The risk of having this fine applied to her was outweighed by the likely outcome that if the man resisted, his trial would be taken to the Sessions court, maximizing the likelihood that he would either marry her or settle out of court to provide maintenance and neither of them would be criminally liable nor have to pay any fines.

The goal of this supposedly oppressive legal structure was community preservation and ensuring that people were responsible for their sexual activity, including any children produced. Of course, as with any system intended to protect women and children, there were predatory males who got away with abuses by moving from town to town or jumping on a ship bound for the Jamaican rum trade. But in general, the system worked, and it gave women of Ballard’s day a mechanism for holding men accountable to a degree that we do not have today.

What we have today is, well, another book entirely.

One big lie that is okay to believe, just not about Benjamin Page

Argh. I promised to keep it brief but we are now up to the equivalent of 8 more pages of text since I made that promise. I am sorry. But not sorry enough to stop. Because there is one major thing I want to thank Lawhon for introducing, even if I disagree with the way she did it.

Big Lie it is okay to believe #1: Medicalization of birth by 1789 harmed midwifery and, by extension, women

The only lie here is that it happened in 1789; it didn’t, but did happen over the century that followed. Please somebody else compile this complicated history into a wonderful book, a novel even, one spanning multiple women’s lives across several centuries? Because this is one I am passionate about. As a woman who gave birth to most of my children with the help of nurse midwives (not at home but in birthing centers), I am so grateful that the sad turn of affairs that was just on the verge of occurring during Ballard’s life had already begun to reverse itself or at least be thoroughly called into question by the time I became a mother.

The turn was away from seeing childbirth as a natural event that most women can experience with support and preparation from the women in their lives, and even with their husband’s help (which Ballard would not have endorsed, but hey, we can grow), to a medical event that requires severe restriction and even alienation from the natural processes that nature and/or God blessed us women with.

If I am a matriarch on any topic, matriarch defined the way I have described elsewhere, it is on this topic. I have brought life into the world many times. Enough times that I am in a tiny statistical minority of women. (I won’t share the number because I intend to remain anonymous and will generally leave facts of my life hard to pin down for that reason.) It is the most powerful, painful, meaningful thing I have ever done and I am grateful that I have been able to do it repeatedly. My first and my last were the hardest; I am grateful for trained doctors (one male, one female) who brought us all through those two events safely. But I am especially grateful for the freedom I had to use many of the techniques that Martha Ballard would have recognized in all of my labors.

My mother did not have this freedom. I was born to her lying flat on a surgical bed, under general anesthesia, having received an enema and having been shaved clean. She loved me and was grateful for me and I know she didn’t mind not having the pain. But what she also didn’t have was the option to do it any other way.

This severe medicalization of childbirth had not yet happened in the time Ballard was practicing, but it was just about to. Young Benjamin Page—a real person in Ballard’s life who did indeed administer too much laudanum to a young woman, effectively freezing her labor in her tracks, an event that is correctly presented in the novel—is painted, unfairly in my estimation, as the embodiment of this shift. In Lawhon’s account, he was dismissive of Ballard’s ways, prejudiced against her sex, and in league with the principal villain of the book.

The book that Lawhon was not trying to write but which I wish someone could is the one in which a Benjamin Page character is followed through the first half of the 1800s, where the medical establishment genuinely did disparage and hold in contempt the accumulated wisdom of midwifery. And in the process ushered in a whole host of changes which legitimately harmed women and children. We still live with the legacy of that shift today in high rates of c-sections, the decisions made by insurance companies about which birthing costs are reimbursable, and in poorer outcomes for mothers and babies.

If anybody wants a historical consultant or just a cheerleader as you write this book, you know where to find me!

Topics for another day

That’s it, I promised to end and so I shall. But just to show you what I am holding back on, I’ll share my outline for the rest of what I came here to say. Maybe I’ll finish writing these thoughts at some point. In the meantime, I have some new novels to read. Thank you for giving this any of your time and attention.

Topic 1: Why do we want to be lied to by other women?

In which I would explore why we women love to read books by other women about lies we want to hear, all the while knowing they are lies. Things like:

• “Men don’t listen to nature” (on the conflation of witchery and the healing arts and the naive belief that any intuitive feeling a woman has about herbs, crystals, bodily processes, or phases of the moon is somehow special)

• Good women in the past were post-racist like we are (on the need to make every woman in the past a “good woman” who either campaigns against injustice generally, racial injustice specifically, or is at least really uncomfortable with it; see also: Good women in the past didn’t approve of killing animals [also known as: don’t make me roll my eyes at you])

Topic 2: At least Lawhon didn’t tell these lies

I have said I approve of authors who sin boldly. But if I’m honest, I have grown tired of the tropes that might have been bold 25 years ago but today are just pandering. So I should be grateful that Lawhon had the sense not to give in to these now-cliches:

• Making Martha sexually adventurous with a swarthy out of towner, or at least in masturbatory refuge where she fantasizes about said swarthy visitor

• Inserting a gay romance, probably not with Martha, but some pairing of women in the town who everybody unfairly judged and Martha saw as having a special love that nobody else should judge and that was better than heterosexual pairing

• Giving Marth a pro-Native American monologue at some point in the book

Topic 3: Would anybody read the book I still wish someone would write about Martha Ballard?

If the author really wanted to write a book grounded in respect for Martha’s actual life (and pass up the chance to write a successful bestseller for sure), she might have:

• Made more from the domestic practices of actual women, including weaving and sewing (there’s an item of attire in this era called “the pocket” which I’m just dying to see someone explore more symbolically, but also role of weaving in forming female relationships, the importance of female interconnectedness through domestic production)

• Dealt with the family’s politics (husband Ephraim was a Tory coming into the Revolutionary War!; he later gets attacked for surveying for large landowners against the interests of local back country independence-minded folk)

• Invented an internal struggle for Martha (a weakness to overcome, mistakes to make, interpersonal growth to work toward; could have been related to family, could have been her own religious issues—she was enmeshed in Reverend Foster’s religious controversies before Rebecca’s rape, or could have been about her questioning her midwife practices in the face of changing attitudes toward birth)

• Foreshadowed Martha’s ultimate decline (in later life she experiences family difficulty, her husband spends 18 months in debtors prison, she was personally very “conservative” in her social thought at a time when things were rapidly changing)

Resources

Obviously, the most important source on this one is Ulrich’s book, which makes more than half of my points above, though not all those about gentle anachronisms or cultural evolution. Ulrich was a master at her craft and my recent re-read of A Midwife’s Tale reminded me of the incredible depth of her research. But she tended to keep her references to the specifics at hand, discussing, for example, the general trends in religious fervor without stopping to explain the foundations of Calvinism. Not a criticism, to be sure. In fact, I don’t allow criticism of Ulrich in my presence!

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher (1990). A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Knopf.

Commentary on Ulrich

Rogers, D. D. (1992). Review of A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812., by L. T. Ulrich. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26(1), 179–182.

Tunc, T. E. (2010). Midwifery and Women’s Work in the Early American Republic: A Reconsideration of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale. The Historical Journal, 53(2), 423–428.

Below are other resources that you might enjoy that delve into the period either specifically or generally, and from which many of my points are derived.

Baumgarten L. Watson J. & Carr F. (1999). Costume close-up: Clothing Construction and Pattern 1750-1790. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Fischer, David Hackett. (1989). Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gross, R. A. (1976). The Minutemen and their World. New York: Hill and Wang.

Larkin, Jack (1988). The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790-1984. New York: Harper & Row.

Lockridge, K. A. (1970). A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736. United Kingdom: Norton.

Willoughby, E. E. (1937). The Reading of Shakespeare in Colonial America. The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 31(1), 45–56.