User:Munfarid1/Women in Sudan

Young Sudanese woman, 2005

Individual as well as collective lives of women in Sudan have been documented in many different historical, geographical, ethnic and social settings. Early examples are archaeological records and images on walls of temples or burial sites, such as female adornment in royal tombs of Nubian queens called Kandake.

or written documents up to descriptions of Sudan in manuscripts and books, or photographs in the 19th century, important changes since the introduction of public schools or modern forms of employment starting in the 20th century.

Social history from different gender and cultural perspectives

"If we wonder why it is necessary to consider women as a distinct social phenomenon, we have only to look at most of the existing literature on the Sudan, be it economics, sociology, history or anthropology. Though not tacitly acknowledging a sexual bias, they are basically accounts of Sudanese male society, past and present. What we are hoping to do in this volume is to describe women's lives, activities and values, as far as possible from a woman's point of view, to counter-balance earlier biases. Then it is possible that we may reach a fuller understanding of Sudanese society as a whole." The Sudanese Woman Page 4 of cover; from the introduction

Sondra Hale 2018 book Gender Politics In Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, And The State

Women in Sudanese society

Women's participation in the work force

noteable roles in public life - diaspora

Women in social and political movements

No to Womenʹs Oppression Initiative, the Sudanese Organisation for Research and Development (SORD), and SEEMA Centre for Training and Protection of Children and Womenʹs Rights. AZZA Women's Association (AYA) women and young people Babiker Badri Scientific Association for Women’s Studies

for example on women in Darfur affected by persecution and trauma

Journals and information spread on social media

"examine the dynamic interaction between the internal factors such as young people or women" before, during and after the Sudanese Revolution.

Laws affecting women

In an article about women's rights in Sudan, journalist Wini Omer gave a short description of political achievements and setbacks before the Sudanese Revolution of 2019:

In Sudan, womenʹs active fight for political and economic rights goes back to the 1960s, when they won the right to political participation (1964) and to equal pay for equal work (1969) as two of many milestones. With the rise of the National Islamic Front (NIF) to power through a military coup in 1989, however, everything changed and the Sudanese womenʹs movement suffered a grave setback, when many of their achievements were reversed. Political Islam posed an unprecedented challenge to womenʹs emancipation in Sudan.

— Wini Omer, journalist and human rights activist, Womenʹs rights in Sudan

, monitoring, advocacy, awareness raising, training and legal aid for endangered groups like women, youth or IDPs and international refugees living in Sudan

Public Order Law - In the aftermath of the revolution, the Transitional ...

Women's health and body politics

Covid-19 poses special burdens and threats on women

Women in culture

Dress and fashion

In her study of Sudanese women before independence in 1956, entitled Khartoum at night: fashion and body politics in imperial Sudan, cultural historian Mary Grace Brown described the changes in dress and public roles as "characterized by economic and cultural exchange, mobility and civic opportunity, and evolving measures of beauty and womanhood."

"Women’s moving bodies were wrapped in a unique form of dress, the tobe. Meaning “bolt of cloth,” a tobe is a rectangular length of fabric, generally two meters wide and four to seven meters long. It is worn as an outer wrapper whenever women are outside their homes or in the company of unrelated males. The tobe’s origins date back to the late eighteenth century when prosperous merchants in Darfur clothed their wives and daughters in large swaths of fine imported linen, muslin, and silk as a sign of their wealth and prestige."

Music and the arts

Apart from their traditional roles of providing for practical material culture in homes, dress, food, .... in music, visual and applied arts and other fields of cultural life.

"Aghanii al-Banaat are songs that are usually performed in women’s gatherings in Central Sudan such as weddings, naming parties, and other gatherings."

Zar cult,

Food and domestic chores

Sudanese woman with ceramic jabana coffee pot

Education and professional training

Primary and secondary education - illiteracy

One of her favorite photographs in the book is that of a midwife riding her bicycle, circa 1925-1935.

“This midwife is remembered not only for her medical work but also as the first Sudanese woman who rode a bicycle,” Brown said. “She did it so she could reach more patients. But for a woman to move her body in that way and travel without a chaperone was a radical thing.”

"The Midwifery Training School (MTS), opened in Omdurman, Sudan in 1921, created a class of modern trained Sudanese midwives out of, and in rivalry to, an entrenched class of traditional midwives. The interaction between Western and traditional medicine and between British and Sudanese societies in the context of midwifery training and practice was highly complex and constantly being negotiated. In their construction of respectability in potential pupils, their choice of language in lectures, their strategies for licensing traditional and trained midwives, and their approach to female circumcision, the British women who ran the MTS, Mabel and Gertrude Wolff, were constantly negotiating with Sudanese culture and encountering the limits of British colonial (medical) power. While midwifery training and practice incorporated the Wolff sisters and Sudanese midwives into the work of the colonial state, they remained marginalized within that state, denied authority, status and remuneration, on account of their gender, class and occupation."

In today's universities in Sudan, women ...

Ahfad University for Women

See also

• Gender inequalitiy in Sudan

Sources

Works cited

• Brown, Marie Grace (2017). Khartoum at night: fashion and body politics in imperial Sudan. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-5036-0152-9. OCLC 1113341178.
• Hale, Sondra (1997). Gender Politics In Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, And The State. Boulder: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-429-96880-8.

Further reading

• Bibliography of works about women in Sudan at WorldCat
• Baxter, Diana (1987). Women and the environment in the Sudan. Toronto: Institute for Environmental Studies. OCLC 222545785.
• Bernal, Victoria (1991). Cultivating workers : peasants and capitalism in a Sudanese village. New york: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-07172-8. OCLC 22421495.
• Hale, Sondra (2008) Sudan. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Bonnie Smith, ed., Vol. 4. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 167-169.
• Lohwasser, Angelika (1999). "Die Frau im antiken Sudan" (PDF). transl.: The Woman in ancient Sudan. In German, with illustrations.
• Sharkey, Heather J. (2003-01-01). "Chronicles of Progress: Northern Sudanese Women in the Era of British Imperialism". The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 31 (1): 51–82. doi:10.1080/714002223. ISSN 0308-6534.