Slavonic and East European Review

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 560 Kuxhausen, Anna. From the Womb to the Body Politic: Raising the Nation in Enlightenment Russia. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2012. xiii + 228 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). Within the ever flourishing field of Russian women’s studies, the history of women in eighteenth-century Russia is still an under-researched subject. Several impressive studies in recent scholarship, though, have uncovered hitherto unexplored aspects of women’s daily experiences and lives in eighteenth-century Russia. Works by Barbara Alpern Engel, Natalia Pushkareva, David Ransel and Wendy Rosslyn, to name just a few, have shown in detail how women’s lives changed as a result of the fundamental political, social and cultural changes brought about by Peter I. Contributing to this historiographical trend, Anna Kuxhausen’s interesting book for the first time examines ideas and practices evolving around pregnancy, childbirth, infant care and early childhood in eighteenth-century Russia. Kuxhausen argues that under the influence of Western European Enlightenment thought, Russia’s emerging public profoundly transformed Russian core beliefs and principles about the role and purpose of child raising. This new commitment to children was aimed at generating Russians who would reform the whole of Russian society and guarantee the growth and strength of the empire. Feeding infants was removed from the private realm of the family and became a matter of imperial state concern. Kuxhausen places Russia’s changing perceptions about childhood in the context of contemporary European attitudes and ideas. Drawing on European manuals and texts, most importantly John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Russian schemes on upbringing (vospitanie) far exceeded their Western European models in scope and imagination. Including every aspect, physiological and moral, of a child’s development from infancy to adulthood — nutrition, clothing, hygiene, exercise, traditional schooling, rules of individual and social behaviour, development of morality — vospitanie was an all-encompassing design meant to transform Russia and its status vis-à-vis Europe. The advocates of vospitanie were Russian-born physicians who had received their education at Western European universities. Kuxhausen focuses in particular on the reform plans of Pavel Zakharovich Kondoidi, a Russian doctor of Greek descent who became head of the Medical Chancellery in 1754, and Nestor Maksimovich Maksimovich (Maksimovich-Ambodik), member of the Medical Collegium under Catherine II and well-known professor of midwifery. Their modern approach to child raising was based on sound REVIEWS 561 medical knowledge and scientific expertise. Licensing exams, courses and education programmes for lay midwives, permanent midwifery institutes as well as textbooks on breastfeeding and maternal practices were to guide midwives, mothers, wet nurses and nannies through pregnancy, delivery and infancy. In the process of developing the new science of maternity, Kuxhausen finds, the medical profession used vospitanie not only as a vehicle to legitimize and enhance its professional and social status within Russian society; through the intrusion of male physicians into the heretofore female world of childbirth and childrearing, the reformers also promoted the construction of a masculine national identity. Progressing from early infancy to young adulthood, Kuxhausen discusses in the last two chapters of her book the new educational environments created in order to bring about a morally regenerated society inculcated with a new Russian identity. Her final chapter, in particular, gives a most interesting and thorough account of the education and life of the girls at the Smolny Institute (oddly labelled as ‘campus’ in the text) and illustrates how girlhood and childhood respectively were constructed across all strata of society as particular stages of life. Kuxhausendrawsoninnovativeresearchandworkswithoriginaldocuments such as children’s primers, grammars, domestic medical texts and handbooks. Maybe because of a lack of sources the book is sometimes speculative and perfunctory in its argument. Kuxhausen does not probe as far as she could the relationship between physicians, science, and the state in order to explain the professional relationship between physicians and midwives beyond gender hierarchies (Elisa Becker’s important study is not mentioned in her work). Although Kuxhausen’s concern is of course the cultural history of childhood, a discussion about the actual impact of enlightened perceptions of childhood in Russian society, apart from a handful of reformers, would have been essential to...