MULHERES DO DESTINO: O PARTO DOMICILIAR NO SUDESTE DO PARANÁ (1940-1970)

Abstract

This study sought to analyze the memories of midwives and parturients, listing an investigation of the knowledge and practices that make up the midwives, graduated and traditional, about home birth between the years 1940 to 1970. Two perspectives of study are used, the first contemplates gender relations and the second includes cultural studies, in order to try to understand and signify the act of midwifery as a cultural practice transmitted through oral tradition, correlated to an act that designates gender roles and the private sphere, which often generated tactical alliances, such as the "comadrio" link. In order to build elements to carry out the research focuses on a spatial approach that encompasses the cities of Imbituva, Irati, Paraná, Ivaí, Rebouças and Teixeira Soares, conducting interviews with ten women residing in these places. The sources used for this investigation were, fundamentally, oral. Through the data collected, the experiences lived in the giving birth, the practice of healing and care, the "comadrio" link, the inherited and acquired knowledge, the rituals and medicinal plants are analyzed. Elements that are linked to the practice of home birth. Therefore, it is about the conceptions of midwifery at home, historically associated to a feminine activity and of the private sphere in which women lived, often on the margins of society and gender roles. Thus, they ended up circumventing the strategies of acting and being, and started to reinvent spaces. As a theoretical and methodological subsidy, it is based on oral history, studies of gender relations and cultural history, giving support to the limits of the construction of knowledge based on practices and rituals, considering the discussions about memory and the conceptions of space, translated into the body and the private sphere. The exercise of this analysis found the bond established between midwives and parturients from the practice of midwifery in homes as an activity that, in addition to alliances between women, generated tactical bonds of female reciprocity that allowed us to visualize the cultural universe of these women's daily activities.