memórias de parteiras - Repositório Institucional da UFSC

ABSTRACT
This study aims at retrieving from midwives’s memories a job that has been historically
related to a female practice. It tries to approach this job to what has been proposed these days
as “humanization of parturition”. It deals with a qualitative study that made use of the Theme
Oral History as a method of understanding the data. Following the tendency of several current
oral historians, the narratives collected from interviews were presented in its totality and
transcribed by the author, in an attempt of keeping all the strength and singularity included in
such speech. Seven collaborators participated in the research: three of them from the state of
Santa Catarina and four from northern Minas Gerais. The colony was made up of women that,
throughout the period of time between the decades of forty and eighty, dedicated to delivering
in either private houses or hospitals, no matter how they were taught to do it. Aiming at
unfolding the ideal included in the narrative concerning a gender basis, the study analized
some aspects that were codified as “sites of meanings” which were: the midwives’s profile;
how and where they used to deliver; vocation; care; humanization and ethics. The collected
data shows a job that was already quite linked to medical knowledge and mixed with common
sense understanding learned from other women, specially when the midwives didn’t have
formal education. Moreover the majority of them were directly or indirectly connected to
nursing. It is clear through the confirmation of some stereotypes concerning gender (in which
the female work is strongly assossiated to private houses) that their job is depreciated –
specially when it comes to salary and importance. The view on midwives as ignorant women
is overcome. Besides, it becomes evident that humanization also demands the healthcare
workers’s dedication about the new political-philosophical perspective of care that is taken by
non-physicians during parturition.