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How did life in Hallowell in 1789 surprise you? Did the characters act as you expected for the historical period? What revelations were most interesting to you? How does our contemporary notion of the American dream apply to these characters?
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Life in 1789 Hallowell did not really surprise me because I have read many other books of a historical nature. I believe the characters acted as I expected for the historical period. Thank heavens the language did not match that time period, i.e. inconsistent spelling. For the most part, men were domineering and some though they were authorities, even if they lacked the training or experience. (Not much has changed with cabinet confirmations going on now.) As in Joseph North who had no legal training, but was made a judge for his service in the French and Indian War which he used to obtain his wealth. Or Dr. Page who thought he had all the knowledge and experience he needed because he went to Harvard. Charles Clark, disappointed that his child is not a son, says “we will try harder again next time. I’ll make sure of it.” Women had no schooling and only learned the skills needed to take care of the home, the garden and the children. They were supposed to be subservient to their husbands and essentially had no rights, only duties. What was most surprising to me was a meal being served by the women helping with the birth when the child was born. Or Martha being responsible for the burial of any stillborn child or one who died while she was still present. The people of this time period definitely worked hard which is part of our contemporary notion of the American dream. Because of their hard lives, I think most people then were more concerned with simply holding onto what they had rather than trying to gain more. But they more readily shared what they had.
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That’s a great analysis, Nancy, especially in regards to the qualifications of the “respected men” in the community! And what Charles Clark said about his new daughter was so disheartening, yet rang so true, as a perfect illustration how how valued that Y chromosome was!
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What surprised me most was how the characters’ thoughts and feelings felt both modern and convincingly true to the year 1789. No doubt there have been brave and outspoken women in the 1700s like Martha. But she probably was an outlier and not how the majority of women of the times would have acted or been allowed to behave. That’s hard to know, of course, with so little women’s history recorded from the time.
The revelation that Martha has legal standing as a midwife was interesting. It gives her more authority to speak her mind. Yet I think Martha lost her temper publicly and shared her opinions far more freely than most women of the time would have been able to do without censure or putting themselves in danger. Her friend Rebecca’s story supports this notion because of the way she is shamed or punished. North attacked Rebecca because he thought she crossed a societal norm by befriending the Wabanaki. I can only imagine what other men might have done to women whose behaviour they judged inappropriate. (The Salem witch trials that took place 100 years earlier come to mind.)
I thought that Ephraim Ballard comes across as unusually supportive and progressive considering that women were considered property at the time. That said, I do think there were decent, forward-looking men at that time just as there are nowadays. The revelation that Ephraim taught Martha how to read and write interested me on a personal level. I come from a family of teachers, and I am reminded of an ancestor of mine. My great-great-grandfather from Northern Ireland had a farm, and he kept a library of old books in a farmhouse so the locals could come and borrow them. Basically, he created a lending library to help his community. Helping others read is something I strongly support because it helps people improve their prospects. I liked how Martha taught her children and wanted to teach Sara White in order for her to better her station in life. I think that the Ballards’ attitudes toward education point to its value to help lift a family out of poverty, and I think that still applies today to the American dream, especially for families with lower economic means.
I’d add that education and its role in helping others can also be dangerous. Again, poor Rebecca Foster has her “progressive ideals of educating the native population, of building a partnership between the two cultures” (pg 61) but it’s exactly this thinking— as Martha points out—that causes people to have divisive opinions about Rebecca and why some people hate her, especially North.
I felt all the issues that Lawhon brings up are so contemporary to today it’s a bit uncanny. The characters and what they go through are so similar to the struggles many families still go through in pursuit of a better life.
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Tara, That is a wonderful story about your great-great-grandfater. What a gift to his community. Education, especially the ability to read, is surely among the most subversive activities one can undertake, especially when it involves teaching women. Certainly that is behind the efforts of contemporary autocratic governments to limit the education of women and girls.
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Tara, I love the story about your great-great-grandfather. Thank you for sharing it with us.
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Like Tara and Nancy, I found life in 1789 rural, small town Maine both different and what I expected. Two aspects stand out for me.
Women who accuse a man of rape are villainized, discredited, accused of lying, to have failed to resist or to have enjoyed being violated. That is fundamentally unchanged in contemporary society. The “Me Too” movement may have moved the needle some and for awhile but, in my view, not far enough and not in a lasting way. I understand that lasting change in deeply engrained attitudes takes time, involves both forward progress and regression. Still, I think the belief that men have a claim on women’s bodies remains for many. In TFR, it falls to the husbands and lovers of women who have been raped to exact punishmen, and a violent one at that. Otherwise, the man is acquitted in a court that makes it virtually impossible for the woman to be heard and minimizes the man’s crime as ‘attempted.”
The second thing I found fascinating was the ambivalent view of intercourse outside of marriage. It was ostensibly condemned and the woman fined (as though only she had any role in a pregnancy) yet also sort of expected and accepted. Healthy weight babies born too soon after the parents married are claimed to be premature. A newly married couple lives apart for two months after the wedding, ostensibly so the husband can make certain he is the father of a child his wife is found to be carrying should she become pregnant before they begin “housekeeping.” And the midwife is required to declare in court the birth of a child conceived outside of marriage and name the father if one is identified. And yet, the community seems to expect that is how things go. I found one of the truly touching scenes in the story when Martha testifies to the birth of Sally Pierce’s child and when asked to name the father, Jonathan steps up to announce it himself and to pay the fine, actually, more than the fine.
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Good points, Jane. There are certainly great examples of double standards regarding sex in this book. What surprised me was that in this community, like you said, they did accept that sex did happen outside of marriage, and was not as severely condemned as it might be in some other communities or eras (The Scarlet Letter came to mind). So maybe, in its way, Hallowell was a progressive community in that aspect. In the attitude towards rape, though, they were mired in the mud, with little justice being done.
And I did admire that Jonathan stepped up and took responsibility for his actions regarding Sally. And I wondered if, in real life, he did that, or if that was a bit of fiction that was somewhat anachronistic — something that we, in this era, would have liked to have seen done, but didn’t necessarily occur.-
Susan, a very interesting question about Jonathan. I suspect it is Lawhon’s take on his character. But, I am now going to look for that in “A Midwife’s Tale.” It is fascinating reading this source and seeing how it is transformed into “The Frozen River.”
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Oh, do let me know if you find an answer! I’d like to pick that book up, too, and compare it. It’s now on my list! Have you seen the documentary that was done based on that book? I want to try to track that down as well.
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Yes, I’d love to hear your thoughts on A Midwife’s Tale as well Jane! And yours too, Susan, if you pick it up. I love the research you both do for every book you read! You both must be very fast readers!! I’m so impressed that you’re reading another AL book as well as AMT, Jane. I just picked up The Searcher and thought I was doing well! lol.
I remember seeing a post about AMT and the film here. Let me see if I can find it…
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Thanks for that link!! I can get that from my library now. Yay!
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I’m not that fast a reader, really- but I listen to books while I walk, and stay up too late sometimes in the evenings reading hard copies! Right now, I’m juggling a couple of different books, trying to get up to speed for our club discussions while dealing with when my local library suddenly decides to gift me with something I put on hold!
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I love that you found the video in your library Susan! I’m using the “manage hold, schedule later” function a lot for all the holds I have on Libby. Too many books, too little time! But also, I need to read all the books!
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I totally understand. I sometimes put several things on hold and they aren’t available for months, and then they all end up coming at once, and I struggle to get them read. I’ll have to get a better battle plan to keep up with the club readings in a timely fashion.
That video is available with my Hoopla, but because my library had somehow “used” all their allotted borrows for the day, I can’t borrow it until after midnight, when they’re allowed more, unless I want to take a chance that they don’t run out tomorrow. That happens periodically with Hoopla, I find. -
I wouldn’t have thought to check the library and Hoopla to be honest. Thank you so much for the reminder; so very helpful, Susan!
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Yes, thank you Susan! We’ve updated our article to add local libraries/Hoopla as an option to borrow the DVDs. We had read on the PBS site that it was only available on Amazon, and didn’t think to check that it might be available elsewhere!
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I also thought the way pregnancies were handled before a marriage was interesting. A mix of practicality (yes it happened) but also pressure (but here’s how we’re going to dissuade you). The woman being fined and possibly jailed points to women again being punished excessively and the men not. Again, the woman and children just seem to fall under the notion of “property” as Tara mentioned. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the notion of ever being considered someone else’s property but then I remember my mother telling me how frustrated she was that she needed her husband to authorize her being able to open a bank account in the 1960s. So finances and women’s rights and freedoms have been tied together with men’s for a very long time and still are for many women. I too am curious wha you will discover in A Midwife’s Tale!
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In 1972 I was a single woman who was beginning her third year of teaching, I had a tenure teaching contract, and needed a car. I had to go home, have my dad co-sign for a car loan at our local bank in order to buy a car. I could not get a credit card in my name alone until 1974. And, I believe it was until 1965 that a woman’s husband had to give her doctor permission for her to be prescribed birth control medicine. I guess when it happens in your lifetime it makes you realize how slowly progress is in the women’s lib movement.
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I remember those days, too, Libby. And there were two other generations of females living within my household; my mother, born in the 1920’s, and my grandmother, born around the time of the Civil War. Even as a child, I was amazed to hear what life was like for them, so many things that I took for granted that they had to live without, or weren’t allowed/expected to do, and what they thought about it. I wish they were still around, so that I could talk to them as a full adult. In some things, progress was lightning-fast, but in others, little seemed to have changed, deep down. Their experiences used to seem so very long in the past, but as I grew up I realized how few years really separated some of our experiences, and how so many things still hadn’t changed, particularly as far as how men and society viewed us.
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Like Nancy, I wasn’t really surprised at what was represented as life in Hallowell in 1789, as far as general details of daily life; the daily routines, clothing, dealing with the weather, procuring food, etc. I was surprised to learn that a midwife such as Martha had as much power and respect as she did; to be appearing in court and having duties other than helping women to deliver. I’m not at all surprised that many women would have respect for her, and would understand and value her worth, but am a bit surprised that some of the men in the community valued her much at all, given how women were assigned a place in society then and expected to stay within it. As many of you have mentioned, it was a male-dominated society, deserved or not. And even though Martha had certain authority in some matters, she still wasn’t allowed to testify without her husband being present. The inequality frustrated and infuriated me, but considering how things still are today in so many ways, it didn’t in the least surprise me; I was instead surprised that she was able to accomplish as much as she did.
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Good points, Susan.
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I liked how enterprising and hardworking most of the characters were. They were all striving not only to survive but make their fortunes off of their efforts. They logged, they built mills, ran taverns, had stores, they farmed, made candles, etc. It fit with my notion that there was little time for idleness if you were going to survive the long winters and feed households with lots of children. I think the attitude of work hard and success will follow is in keeping with the American dream.
When Lawhon describes how the town sprung up because of the river and how it connects them to Boston and the economy I couldn’t help but think of how world economies are still driven so much by the natural resources we extract from land and how we transport those resources. I can’t help but think of all the talk going on about Greenland and the Panama Canal etc. Times haven’t changed that much at all!
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You are so right, Maureen. There wasn’t much room for slacking off in those days; unless you were rich and could afford to be waited on, you were going to have to live a hard, active life. And whoever had the most of anything valuable, be it money, land, resources, had the power; and those assets were coveted; just like today. Scary, actually.
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I echo all the other comments here in that it wasn’t much of a surprise that several of the men were depicted as cads and villains and treated women poorly, given that time in history. There was (and still is) that an infuriating undercurrent of misogyny, especially by those in power. So I appreciated that many of the couples, like the Ballards and the Pollards, worked together as equals to run their businesses and raise their families.
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I haven’t read very much history from this time period, but one aspect that stood out for me was Martha’s description of Hallowell as a community of “first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants” and that there was English, German, French, Spanish spoken (and we know Abigail Pollard is Scottish, Ephraim is Welsh etc.) It’s in keeping with the notion of America as the land of opportunity, where immigrants can come to make a better life for themselves. Being an immigrant then is very different from being an immigrant today. And similarly, attitudes towards immigrants was very different then, compared to North American attitudes towards immigrants today.
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