Good Wives

This enthralling work of scholarship strips away those abstractions to reveal the hidden -- and not always stoic -- face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In these pages we encounter the awesome burdens -- and the considerable power -- of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising -- and, all too often, mourning -- her children, and even attaining fame as a heroine of frontier conflicts or notoriety as a murderess. Painstakingly researched, lively with scandal and homely detail, Good Wives is history at its best.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich received the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly and John H. Dunning Prizes for 1990 for A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812. She is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.