On paper, Morocco looks like a public health success story. Since 1995, women dying in childbirth declined by 64%. Yet under the official statistics is a different story—riots erupted in the Rif region in 2017, in part over lack of health care. Midwives are burning out and leaving the profession. History demonstrates that health issues, the lack of clean water, food, and health care, is often a catalyst for political unrest. Addressing women’s health requires knowing the local contexts under official statistics, understanding how women experience birth in Morocco, and how midwives work in society. I propose to use the history of midwifery, oral interviews, and insights from gender studies to address contemporary global health challenges for birthing mothers and midwives. This paper engages an essential question: Are biomedical midwives the answer to providing Moroccan women with the health care they need in pregnancy, birth, and infant health? A 2014 series in the Lancet thinks so; the authors argue that maternal and infant health care in low and middle income countries is medicalized, fragmented, and delivered through clinics. The midwife is the Lancet solution—a community-based caregiver who gives holistic, woman-centered care and who mediates between localities and hospital health teams. But are midwives the solution? Preliminary interviews suggest the answer is complex. In High Atlas villages, residents say the midwife in the local clinic is antagonistic and women avoid her; the clinic often stands empty, or local women prefer traditional birth attendants, or the midwife doesn’t come to clinic, all scenarios common in countries with fragile health systems across. Rabat midwifery professors point out that new midwifery graduates are sent to rural areas to work alone, or to understaffed urban hospitals, and the midwife has little legal protection in the event of a negative medical outcome. The birth challenges in Morocco are thus social, gender, health system, policy, historical, legal, and political—then medical. This paper explores how medical history and oral interviews can provide essential context to guide our understanding and help draft effective health policy. Global health interventions often fail because WHO practice guidelines are prepared in western countries out of step with local realities. This challenge is exacerbated by the “context-blind,” “evidence-based” data collection process that dominates global health work. History can expand our understanding of birth and midwifery, of women’s experiences, needs, and voices, and help us understand the birth process in Morocco past and present.

Hasso (2005) argues that researchers need to pay more attention to the lives of women on the margins as as this is where the essentialist binaries that dominate the discourse on women in the Middle East are shown as failing to accurately reflect the complexities and realities of women's lives. In a similar vein, Sehlikoglu (2017) shows that as feminist research in the Middle East has developed, it has often worked towards breaking stereotypes about women. This paper makes three key arguments: first, that more research, especially in the social sciences, needs to focus on women’s lived experiences. Heeding Hasso’s words, I argue this research needs to utilize methods that can show the details of women’s lives and work beyond what current trends in empirical research emphasize. This is due to the limits such research places on respondents’ narratives and due to the declining democratic climate research may occur in. I argue case studies give the opportunity to forefront women’s voices, thoughts, and reasoning—illustrating the complex identities and realities that Hasso urges researchers to center. This paper’s second argument is that the next phase of development among feminist research needs to be guided by research informants/participants. As Sehlikoglu points out, feminist work has recently focused on exploring the relationship among gender, Islam, and secularism. In order to escape such researcher-imposed themes, feminist research needs to begin with and forefront women’s experiences and the identities participants feel are most important. This paper’s final argument is that researchers should employ social media to conduct case studies. Researchers—especially those who have years of field research to contextualize the work—under-utilize social media. Yet, the use of public social media accounts has many benefits. The benefits include that they are written in the women’s own words, the women managing the accounts only post as much as they are comfortable with given the security situations they face, and that the posts on these accounts often highlight the intersectionality of women’s identities.

With the emergence of the Internet in Iran, circa 1998, Iranian women have used the Internet as an emancipatory means to pursue their rights and freedoms. The new realm of the internet introduced a unique space that encompassed both public and private factors which provided the opportunity to learn, communicate, discuss, and interact (Hague & Loader, 1999; Sardar & Ravetz, 1996; Turkle, 1995). The absence of body in the digital realm provided women with a new less masculinized space of knowledge and appearance that empowered the practice and awareness of body mobility. This qualitative feminist research conducted in depth interviews to investigate and compare Iranian women’s practice of body mobility in online and public realms. I critically examined the use of social media by several Iranian women to explore the role of gender-oriented socio-cultural values that affected their online and public activities/mobility. Borrowing critical and transnational feminist theories, this study concluded that online interaction boosted feminist consciousness and constructed a global solidarity that led empowerment. My research further suggests the online realm offers a safer space for sharing and learning, and has altered the meaning of some Iranian women’s traditional stands concerning body mobility, and therefore it has brought the boundaries between the public and private realms closer together. However, trapped by body discipline and social order, the women were forced to silently participate in online communities. Conformity, common amongst all the participants, hindered their autonomous online mobility and voice as they avoided communication and interaction. In the absence of legal or societal protections for women and with an inability to solve the root causes of gender inequality Iranian women are forced to find alternatives, such as using private accounts and sustaining an anonymous identity to protect themselves from social discipline and otherness. While the sense of control seems empowering, their hesitation on social media, even within a private account indicated that their behavior and autonomy is not limited by the space, but rather by the patriarchal ideology, techniques of bodies and oppositional duality. Key terms: emancipatory pedagogy, empowerment, Iranian women, social media, mobility.