Second Sight: Granny Midwives as Insurgent Propoenents of Black Health in the Progressive Era Público
Foster, Niara (Spring 2022)
Abstract
This project explores the lives and work of granny midwives in the early twentieth century. Granny midwives were Black women lay midwives whose practice consisted of a complex combination of West African spirituality and medical care deployed to assist Black mothers in pregnancy, delivery, and fertility. Through centering the voices and experiences of the midwives, this project demonstrates the various ways that ordinary, rural, and often poor Black women have resisted. Amid regulation, supervision, and attempts to curtail the midwives' traditional religio-medical practice, the midwives resisted, providing delivery services and relying on their ethic of care that centered community and healing. This resistance continued even after the formal Progressive Era in cities such as Baltimore Maryland. In Baltimore, the skeptical reading of the historical archive indicated the presence of networks of abortion care with which the granny midwives operated despite the crushing legal consequences. Analyzing a granny midwife's oral history as a trickster narrative in comparison to the activism of other Black organizations such as the National Medical Association and the Tuskegee Institute, demonstrated the sophisticated resistance that was Black women's movement within the silence. Together the chapters demonstrate the complex ways that Black women granny midwives have complicated the histories of obstetrics and gynecology, modern medicine, abortion, and activism. Their work of silent resistance cultivated healing and life in a society fraught with racial violence and inequality and positions them as influential figures in the fight for Black American life.
Table of Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………..……….1
Chapter 1: Clash of Care.…………………………………..……………7
Chapter 2: Lose Your Daughter.………………….…………….….…...24
Chapter 3: Sound and Silence………………………...……..………….39
Conclusion……………………………………………………...………58
Bibliography …………………………………………………...……….63
About this Honors Thesis
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