2012, Pages 1-228
Abstract
In Russia during the
second half of the eighteenth century, a public conversation emerged
that altered perceptions of pregnancy, birth, and early childhood.
Children began to be viewed as a national resource, and childbirth
heralded new members of the body politic. The exclusively female world
of mothers, midwives, and
nannies came under the scrutiny of male physicians, state institutions, a
host of zealous reformers, and even Empress Catherine the Great. Making
innovative use of obstetrical manuals, belles lettres, children's
primers, and other primary documents from the era, Anna Kuxhausen draws
together many discourses-medical, pedagogical, and political-to show the
scope and audacity of new notions about childrearing. Reformers aimed
to teach women to care for the bodies of pregnant mothers, infants, and
children according to medical standards of the Enlightenment. Kuxhausen
reveals both their optimism and their sometimes fatal blind spots in
matters of implementation. In examining the implication of women in
public, even political, roles as agents of state-building and the
civilizing process, From the Womb to the Body Politic offers a nuanced,
expanded view of the Enlightenment in Russia and the ways in which
Russians imagined their nation while constructing notions of childhood. ©
2013 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All
rights reserved.
ISBN: 029928994X;978-029928994-2
Original language: English
Document Type: Book
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
