"American Experience" A Midwife's Tale Soundtrack (1998)

Synopsis

A Midwife's Tale (adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning book) unfolds like a detective story - the true tale of two women, two hundred years apart, linked by the diary one of them left behind. Traditional accounts of the past leave out the lives of ordinary people because they left so few written records behind - especially the women. But A Midwife's Tale follows author Laurel Ulrich as she deciphers the massive but cryptic diary of midwife Martha Ballard. We look though the eyes of Martha (played by actress Kaiulani Lee), at both the daily and the shockingly dramatic events that shook her frontier community. We come to know Martha as the primary healer in her community, coping with births and deaths, epidemics, her own unruly son, and the judge who has raped the minister's wife. As we share her struggles to survive in a period of dizzying social change, intense religious conflict, and economic boom and bust, we realize that we are witnessing the birth of the modern world in which we live. A Midwife's Tale reveals the lives of ordinary people, making visible history that has remained invisible for centuries. It takes us to a world that is foreign yet strangely familiar.

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