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'A Sudanese woman is like a watermelon, because there is no way in'. In the late twentieth century, this popular saying evoked the ideal northern Sudanese woman, who, having been 'circumcised', had a womb that was sealed from the world and capable of producing 'moral offspring' (pp. 111, 296). In the early twentieth century, British officials regarded the circumcised Sudanese woman differently. Horrified by the local practice of female genital cutting, which went far beyond clitoridectomy and required that women be cut open during childbirth, British officials set out to reform the custom. In Civilizing Women, Janice Boddy examines British policies towards female circumcision, which began with the establishment of a Midwifery Training School in 1921 and culminated in 1946 in an unenforced and ineffectual ban. This is a fascinating and richly detailed book that will stimulate debate for years to come.
Boddy focuses on the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898-1956) but draws connections that go well beyond that. Thus she links what she calls a British colonial 'crusade' against Sudanese female circumcision to the 'highly visible international crusade to end female genital cutting' (p. 2) in the late twentieth century. She implicitly equates British interventions in the early twentieth-century Sudan with American interventions in Iraq today. The entire book, she writes, 'is a protracted allegory for imperialism in the early twenty-first century' (p. 8), that is, for cultural imperialism in the name of civilization and human rights. The book offers fascinating insights into what female circumcision has meant in northern Sudan, while advancing arguments to explain why British policies did so little...