From the Womb to the Body Politic: Raising the Nation in Enlightenment Russia by Anna Kuxhausen (review)

Nikolai Novikov, a journalist and late eighteenth-century “Russian Enlightener,” noted that “it is recognized that the upbringing of children is as highly important for the state as it is for every particular family” (60). Discussions of the “upbringing of children” (vospitanie) and its significance for Russian political and intellectual elites of the eighteenth century are the focus of Anna Kuxhausen’s welcome analysis of ideas and practices of childrearing in Enlightenment-era Russia. The themes encompassed by this idea of “vospitanie” and Kuxhausen’s exploration of it include pregnancy and childbirth, infant care, early childhood nurturance, and education, including girls’ education in particular.

The author employs a rich and very interesting range of sources: these include Enlighteners’ treatises on midwifery, advice manuals for parents, memoirs, and the like, as well as documents about state projects aimed at implementing some of the new notions of upbringing such as records of midwife training programs and girls’ schools.

These “Russian Enlighteners” who are the focus of much of Kuxhausen’s study are members of the educated classes involved in the discourse about childrearing. They range from the Empress Catherine the Great through provincial doctors. These “Enlighteners,” Kuxhausen argues convincingly, shared a common agenda (if not views on particular topics) that involved a nationally conscious attempt to improve the Russian nation and state through improving the care of children. This project came to be especially prominent during the reign of Catherine II, who took over the imperial throne in 1762. She not only closely supervised state commissions relevant to medicine and education and institutions such as schools and orphanages, she even was involved directly in the realm of letters as a writer of children’s stories and also of a treatise (written in 1784) directing the upbringing of her own grandchildren.

The study is notable as an addition to the historiography of childhood that brings to English-language audiences a new comparative analysis and new comparative evidence about ideas of childhood, childcare, mothering, and related questions. What’s especially exciting about the comparative framework here is not only that Kuxhausen herself thinks comparatively and draws upon historical literature of Western Europe to underscore both the shared terrain and the particularities of the Russian case, but also that she is attuned to how the Enlighteners themselves thought comparatively in their own time. Indeed, as she points out, many of them had traveled or been educated in the West, especially the medical men, since there were no medical schools in Russia at the time.

The comparative framing informs Kuxhausen’s arguments. For example, she offers an interesting comparative argument about the positionality of Russian authors on mothering vis-à-vis different class practices. Like Western authors, Russians too criticized the negligent mothering of many aristocratic women, but in contrast with some prominent Western writers like Rousseau, they do not idealize the “natural” mothering of peasant women, or presume that good mothering “comes naturally.” Apparently in Russia all mothers were in need of educating!

Another example of a comparative insight has to do with the relationship between doctors and midwives. In Russia, Kuxhausen argues, there was a somewhat distinctive and more cooperative relationship between doctors and midwives, contrasting with that in many Western areas where medical professionalization was accompanied by efforts by doctors to oust midwives from the childbirth process and the midwife’s practical knowledge from the realm of the scientific.

One more theme of wise comparative interest involves religion. In discussions of moral education, in the writing of books for children, and in plans for girls’ educational institutions, the protonational conscious that permeates these discourses presumes a relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church as a given. The church in Russia is thus perforce a partner (however problematic) and not an enemy of the Enlightened upbringing of children.

This is a very rich and well-researched book. The arguments at...