Rebozos, shawls and scarves-the lost art of supporting women through the childbearing years.

I was introduced to the art of using the traditional Mexican shawl called the rebozo back in 2013 when I attended a workshop by doula Stacia Smales Hill on rebozo use for labour and birth. During the same year I also attended a workshop by Dr Rocio Alarcon, who taught us a postnatal massage technique called closing the bones, some elements of which included rocking and binding with a rebozo.

Over the course of the following years I pursued my knowledge further by doing several more workshops with Rocio, and several other rebozo workshops with different focuses, such as the rebozo for labour progress and malposition with Selina Wallis, micromovements with Francoise Freedman, and 2 iterations of spinning babies with Jennifer Walker and Gail Tully, and more recently, a workshop on healing diastasis recti  with Birthlight which included many rebozo techniques.

I am also a babywwearing instructor and tutor, and as such use rebozos and wraps to carry babies too.

As I started teaching workshops around closing the bones and rebozo work as well as babywearing, the incredibly versatile use of the cloth really blew my mind.

As I met people through teaching, I constantly questioned people I met about their culture’s practises, I started to build a picture in my mind of something much more universal than the rebozo.

It seems that every culture had a piece of cloth of some kind, call it a shawl, a sarong, a scarf, or a wrap.

Cold countries have thick, woollen fabrics (think Welsh Shawl or Scottish plaid), and warmer countries, cooler, thin, cotton fabric (think African Kanga or Indonesian Sarong).

There are almost too many fabrics to count, but one thing is for sure, women have used all sorts of cloths in incredibly versatile ways, and what I’m going to say below about the rebozo is true for many other cultures too. It’s a truly universal practise.

I spent a few years believing that the rebozo use for labour was uniquely South American but I have since met a Somalian midwife who told me how they use their traditional shawl, called a Garbasar, in a similar way during labour.

I trained a Moroccan birth worker in doing closing the bones, and she was surprised when she started offering the massage that women came forward and told her they’d had a similar treatment in the local hammam after birth (using the traditional Moroccan cloth called a Mendil).  Tunisia offers a similar practise called a fouta massage (the fouta is a hammam towel, which is very similar in nature to the Turkish towel).

I am lucky to be part of a multicultural family, being French and married to a man from Hong Kong. In Hong Kong I’ve been told they use a long piece of muslin cloth to bind the woman’s hips and abdomen after birth.

It’s also quite fascinating to see how contact with foreign cultures can influence each other. For example I recently acquired a Dutch postpartum girdle called a Sluitlaken. I couldn’t help but notice how similar to Indonesian postpartum binding it looks, then a friend pointed out than Holland used to have Indonesian colonies!

So, what can you do with a rebozo (or a scarf of shawl)?

Pretty much all cultures on the planet, some kind of cloth is used to cradle and carry a baby. In some cultures is used to rock and soothe the baby too. Rocking is such a primal rhythm we all experienced it in our mother’s womb, that we find it soothing all through our lives.  Even in Europe there are pictures of women wearing their babies in Welsh shawls which date from the 1940s.

Later, when the baby grew into a toddler and child, she would use the cloth to dress up, pretend play (including carrying toys and/or animals, pretending to carry a baby), make a den etc.

As the child grew into a young woman she would use the cloth as a shawl to keep warm, as a clothing accessory, a blanket, to carry siblings ( in traditional cultures women learn baby care from a very young age as they tend to live with extended families), and to carry loads on her back or head.

Later still when she became a woman, she might have been given her own shawl as part of a menarche ceremony. She might have worn a special cloth on her wedding day.

When she became pregnant, she would have used the shawl to support her belly, and her midwives would have used it to alleviate the aches and pains of pregnancy, and maybe to help the baby move into the best position for birth.

As the shawl came out of fashion and modern practises like using pushchairs became seen as more fashionable and desirable, this skill was soon lost, and because like most traditional women-only practises, it was just passed on orally rather than written about, the knowledge was lost very quickly, in one or two generations. We also tend to embrace “modern” practises mindlessly, seeing traditional ones as backwards and old fashioned.

Mexican and Chinese friends tell me that nobody wants to use the traditional shawl or carrier these days as only remote farmers or beggars still use them.

This is  something that we need to reclaim and teach all women, as it is part of the essence of women circles and supporting women through life transitions.

This is why I am so passionate about passing this skills to both expectant and new mothers, and to anybody who works with expectant and new mothers. It is our birthright!

You can learn more about Rebozo and its many wonderful uses in my upcoming course “Using rebozos, scarves and shawls for the childbearing year)