Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a methodology developed to explore midwives’ everyday practices of care in Sudan (1899-1970s), using materials ranging from oral history interviews and archival collections to family documents, songs, poems, short stories and novels, collected under conditions of an ongoing war.

Paper long abstract:

My paper addresses the panel’s challenging issue of finding methodologies apt for writing histories of the everyday by presenting the case of midwives' practices of care in Sudan from 1899 to the 1970s. Such practices have been rarely documented so far, which forms part of a more general neglect of the history of women’s everyday working practices, especially with professions that have long been considered to be marginal. In this sense, the history of midwifery is an extraordinary challenge, all the more so in a context where historiography is still limited and/or very focused on established, ostensibly ‘large’ aspects. The Sudanese historiography has indeed been focusing on political leaders or, in the medical field, on doctors, besides studying the country’s medical system as a whole. Given this low level of previous documentation, I will discuss how I have been collecting data, with special consideration of the conditions imposed by war in study areas, an aspect of vital importance in today’s Sudan. My method of mobilizing data resources includes interviews with the oldest living generation of midwives and nurses, in addition to doctors, unionists and others who have worked with them, as well as archival material from administrative and missionary collections in the UK and WHO archives in Geneva. But I also make use of newspapers, visual material from families, and social media posts focusing on Sudan. A further type of material is composed of songs, poems, short stories and novels that reflect on midwives’ historical experiences.