Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan

(Paperback)

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Civilizing Women is a riveting exploration of the disparate worlds of British colonial officers and the Muslim Sudanese they sought to remake into modern imperial subjects. Focusing on efforts to stop female circumcision in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 1920 and 1946, Janice Boddy mines colonial documents and popular culture for ethnographic details to interleave with observations from northern Sudan, where women's participation in zar spirit possession rituals provided an oblique counterpoint to colonial views. Written in engaging prose, Civilizing Women concerns the subtle process of "colonizing selfhood," the British women who undertook it, and those they hoped to reform. It suggests that efforts to suppress female circumcision were tied to the continuation of slavery and the rise of commercial cotton growing in Sudan, as well as to concerns about infant mortality and maternal health. Boddy traces maneuverings among political officers, teachers, missionaries, and medical personnel as they pursued their elusive goal, and describes their fraught relations with Egypt, Parliament, the Foreign Office, African nationalists, and Western feminists.In doing so, she sounds a cautionary note for contemporary interventionists who would flout local knowledge and belief.

Reviews

"Boddy sounds a cautionary note for contemporary interventionists who would flout local knowledge and belief."--Frauen Solidaritat "Anthropologist Boddy scoured the archives in Britain and Sudan to study attempts by British health care workers in northern Sudan to stop or at least redirect female genital cutting, the phrase that now covers female circumcision. But the author cleverly also deals with Sudan's history."--B.M. du Toit, Choice "The book's most important contribution is the documentation of the development of midwifery training schools and their linkage to the control of women's bodies. This is the core of Boddy's argument, and she has done an exceptional job of organizing and presenting the colonial administration's political-cultural imperatives for the development of these schools."--Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

Author Bio

Janice Boddy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of "Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan" and coauthor of "Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl" (Random House), which has been translated into fourteen languages.