The Frozen River

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Background

Historical Context: Martha Ballard, Frontier Midwife

Martha Moore Ballard (1735-1812) was a New England midwife, known best by historians for her diary recording daily life in 18th-century Maine. She was informally trained but never recorded a single maternal mortality in the 816 births she recorded during her 27 years of diary-keeping. This extraordinary success rate during a time when childbirth was consistently deadly is part of what attracted Ariel Lawhon to Ballard’s story. Waiting for an appointment with her doctor while pregnant herself, Lawhon read an article about Ballard and thought to herself: “My own doctor—the one I was anxiously waiting to see—couldn’t boast a record like that” (418).

Despite her remarkable skill, Ballard remained an obscure figure until 1990, when historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich published her groundbreaking biography A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on her Diary 1785-1812. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and catapulted Martha into a position of historical importance. In A Midwife’s Tale, Ulrich argues that Ballard’s diary provides key evidence for the economic value generated by female laborers, including midwives, in colonial America. This analysis challenged traditional understandings of colonial gender roles and ushered in a new wave of historians seeking to understand pre-industrial women’s labor history. For Ulrich, a rich portrait of the female colonial experience lay beneath the diary’s scant, straightforward entries: “For all its reticence, Martha’s diary is an unparalleled document in early American history. It is powerful in part because it is so difficult to use, so unyielding in its dailiness” (A Midwife’s Tale, 33). In The Frozen River, Lawhon expands upon this vision, attempting to fill in the gaps left by Ballard’s sparse writing style.

Legal Context: Rape Cases in 18th-Century New England

The Frozen River takes place in an archaic era of sexual assault and rape law. In A Midwife’s Tale, Ulrich presents some illustrative statistics:

Only ten men were tried for rape in Massachusetts in the entire eighteenth century, none after 1780. Between 1780 and 1797, there were sixteen indictments and ten convictions for attempted rape, still a small number considering that the population of the state approached 400,000 (Ulrich 118).

The sparsity of these figures should not be taken as evidence that rape rarely occurred in the English colonies. To the contrary, sexual violence was a daily reality, especially for women and people of color. As John Gilbert McCurdy writes, “Male sexual power was thought of as normative, thus obfuscating a woman’s resistance and discrediting her consent” (McCurdy, John Gilbert. “Gender and Violence in Early America” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume 3, Page 261). The Rebecca Foster rape case demonstrates this dynamic quite clearly. In 1789, Foster accused three men, including Joseph North, of raping her, but no men were ever prosecuted.

Ballard’s diary presents the plight of rape survivors in 18th-century America with vivid emotion. Ballard initially urges Foster not to go public with her accusations, fearing that the stigma attached to them would prove catastrophic to her public reputation. Women were the ones who faced punishment for the sexual crimes committed against them by men, rendering laws that designated rape as a capital crime ineffective. In the 21st century, when the Me Too Movement has placed rape culture under high legal scrutiny, Lawhon finds common ground with the women of the 18th century. The challenges of dismissal and disbelief that prevented colonial women from seeking legal recourse are, in many ways, the same obstacles that face contemporary rape survivors, and this subtext informs the tone of the entire novel.