I did not want to do a separatist woman's history. I wanted to understand how important political and economic events related to the everyday events in Martha's life. But it was hard to keep the background and foreground in balance. And I wanted to keep Martha in the foreground. When you decide to write about the life of an ordinary person, you start out with the premise that this person is not important because of some thing they did or who they were, but because understanding ordinary life has a value of its own.
History is based on sources, and it depends upon what gets saved and preserved.
What gets saved are pimarily public documents. A lot of social history, which was an effort to counteract history as the extended shadow of rulers and presidents, made people anonymous. I think one of the reasons A Midwife's Tale has gotten so much attention is that like the old fashioned histories, it's a biography, so it tells the story of a period through one life. But like the new social history, it's a community study. The very thing that had attracted me to the diary in the first place was also the thing that made it difficult to work with.