How do women in Niger experience pregnancy and childbirth differently from women in the United States or Europe? Barbara M. Cooper sets out to understand childbirth in a country with the world’s highest fertility rate and an alarmingly high rate of maternal and infant mortality. Cooper shows how the environment, slavery and abolition, French military rule, and the rapid expansion of Islam have all influenced childbirth and fertility in Niger from the 19th century to the present day. She sketches a landscape where fear of infertility generates intense competition between communities, ethnicities, and co-wives and creates a culture where concerns about infertility dominate concerns about overpopulation, where illegitimate children are rejected, and where the education of girls is sacrificed in the name of avoiding shame. Given a medical system poorly adapted to women’s needs, a precarious economy, and a political context where it is impossible to address sexuality openly, Cooper discovers that it is little wonder that pregnancy and birth are a woman’s greatest pride as well as a source of grave danger.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Glossary of ethnonyms, acronyms and foreign terms
Introduction
1. Environment, Seduction and Fertility
2. Tensions in the Wake of Conquest: Gender and Reproduction after Abolition
3. Personhood, Socialization and Shame
4. Colonial Accounting
5. Perils of Pregnancy and Childbirth
6. Producing Healthy Babies and Healthy Laborers
7. Feminists, Islamists and Demographers
8. Let’s talk about Bastards
9. Contemporary Sexuality and Childbirth
Conclusion: Traveling Companions and Entrustments in Contemporary Niger
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Barbara M. Cooper is Professor of History and Department Chair at Rutgers University. She is author of Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger and Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel, which was awarded the Herskovits Prize for the best book published in African studies.
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