Photographs of graduating classes of dayas from maternity training schools in 1920s Egypt provide a rare glimpse into the world of birth work and the new racialized and gendered hierarchies established in maternal health care under British colonial rule. Dayas have received little attention in the literature on the history of reproduction in Egypt. Instead, scholars have focused on hakimas (female medical officers) and pointed to their undermining along with the training of Egyptian male doctors in the fields of obstetrics and gynecology to argue for the masculinization and medicalization of childbirth under the British. But was this indeed what happened? Drawing on works by Egyptian doctors Naguib Mahfouz and Aly Alaily, Department of Public Health reports, and the private papers of imperial women doctors Bonté Elgood and Grace de Courcy and the nurse-midwife Mabel Wolff, this paper examines the interactions of various actors involved in childbirth. Moving between the imperial medical doctors and matrons who designed critical parts of the colonial medical infrastructure, the unnamed dayas who attended the new maternity training schools, and pregnant and parturient women, this paper will show that it was dayas, and not hakimas and male doctors, who delivered the bulk of Egyptian babies under colonial and semi-colonial rule, with most babies being delivered at home, not in hospitals. The colonial state, and the imperial women who worked for it, sought to reshape birth workers and birthing practices, determining who could and could not deliver babies and how they ought to do it, instituting new statistical regimes, supine postures, and sterilization practices. Rather than masculinize and medicalize childbirth, imperial women doctors strove to modernize a system of women-centered care for delivery of babies within the home, creating a maternal health model that they believed could be reproduced. Yet dayas often rebuffed the reforms, choosing only the practices that suited them and the laboring women they assisted. The regime that imperial doctors introduced might have been part of the undoing of this women-centered model, for the articulation of a binary of “normal” and “abnormal” births that arose would eventually lead to a shift from conceptualizing childbirth as a natural process, best carried out in the intimacy of the home, to one that was considered dangerous, and thus needed pre-emptive hospital care. But this was a shift that would be decades in the making.