Leah’s Love Letter to Maine

Requiem to Unsung Maine Women,  “Architects of Society”

Maine’s voice, Maine’s legacy, Maine’s women,  “punch above their weight class”. 

In the 200 years since Maine became the 23rd state in what was known as the Missouri Compromise, a steady stream of remarkable women has continued to emerge from this profound place, eight generations of brilliant minds, voices, legacies… women who are not revered or even referenced nearly enough. Architects of society such Frances Perkins, and Rachel Carson,  Samantha Smith, and Margaret Chase Smith, but one particular woman comes to mind when I think of my own story arc, and that is late 19th century midwife Martha Ballard.

Before obstetrics was even a field, Martha Ballard recorded some 10,000 entries between 1785 and 1812, serving the Hallowell area, crossing the frozen Kennebec River in winter, to midwife a total of 816 babies spanning her 27 years of caring for pregnant mothers in and around what has been anglicized, Augusta. 

Girls of Martha's time period would not have been educated to read or write …and any written records that might have been kept by women two centuries ago, were belittled as mere “diaries” and not preserved as a thing of value or significance. Despite this, Maine midwife Martha Ballard, penned meticulous daily details keeping unparalleled data on the pregnancies, the labors and the health of mothers and babies -  though no one asked her to or told her to. She.just.knew. And she trusted her knowing.

What Martha Ballard of Hallowell did not know in 1791 was that those details she scribed and preserved would be turned into a Pulitzer Prize winning publication in 1991, or that a free-standing birth center would be named after and invoke her legacy in the years following the publication of her words, her perspective, her knowledge. Martha would never know that this birthing center, The Ballard House, would serve as the launch pad for a non-profit organization, Birth Roots, that would redefine the perinatal care of new parents by building out missing infrastructure of non-clinical care in collaboration with more than 7,000 families - spanning the first two decades of the 21st century - in Cumberland County, Maine. Martha would never learn that in May of 2026, after years and  years of advocacy work, Maine would become the 13th state to enact Paid Family Leave during a time in our country’s history where 25% of those holding a two week old baby in their arms, who should be resting and healing, in fact return to work just 10 days postpartum. 

Not unlike Martha Ballard, the founders of Birth Roots, two unassuming, working class women, born and raised and shaped by Maine’s diverse seasons and diverse landscapes, an inescapable exposure to complexity; a complex ecosystem that produces  both resourcefulness and an imagination for what is missing, would create Birth Roots out of necessity. What the founders of Birth Roots have in common with other quick witted women from Maine, the Samantha Smiths and the Martha Ballards, architects of society in their own right, is the tenacity to do something that no one was asking them to do, filling a vacuum of leadership that no one had identified needed filling.  

Maine is both a place and a state of mind. Maine is as Maine does… visionary, responsive, grounded in both values and the reality of melting snow, capillaries of groundwater becoming rivers of confluence, brackish water, vernal pools, nurseries for fostering next generations, comprising a whole greater than the sum of its parts. From these parts and from this whole, brilliant minds emerge and fill leadership vacuums. Maine’s voice, Maine’s legacy, Maine’s women,  “punching above their weight class” as they have for 200 years.