Boriak О. The midwifery and the midwife in Ukrainian traditional culture: history, ritual, mithology.

The thesis is the first comprehensive analysys of the midwife (Ukr. baba-povytukha) - traditional figure of an illiterate woman acting as a professional obstetrician. Integral presentation of the "women in the cultural history" is impossible without systematic research of the status, functions and social role of a woman in Ukrainian family, as well as analysis of the "woman" ritual, folklore, every day social and normative culture etc. Giving birth and bringing up children formed the center of a woman's life. Most of the gender studies so far conducted in Ukraine look at the woman in terms of her social and legal status, norms of family relationships, and her participation in political and social life. This thesis is based on the unique ethnological and folklore materials, gathered in the course of fieldwork, conducted in more than a one hundred forty villages in eleven main ethnographic regions of Ukraine. To date, the experts of folk midwifery and particularly the women who bore their children with the aid of a midwife (mostly women of 85), are becoming scarcer. Apart from that, it presents empirical evidence, which was found in the archives and manuscripts of the late XIX century and beginning of the XX century, as well as relevant data on the midwife status in Slavic and non-Slavic traditions, collected from other sources. The author was struck by the very interdisciplinary nature of the topic, as it touches upon the fields of social history, ethnology, folklore, literature, linguistics, and medicine. This material, along with other previously unknown archival materials is now put in.