Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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The Joy of Painless Motherhood: The Reproductive Policy of the Bolsheviks in the 1930s
Almira Sharafeeva
ABSTRACT:
In the Soviet Union of the 1930s, motherhood was seen as a natural need of women. The masculine Bolshevik state did not see the emancipated woman as free from her maternal burden. Throughout the first two decades of Soviet rule there were discussions about the effects of abortion, childbirth, and breastfeeding on a woman’s life, health, and appearance. Most of the discussion reflected a cynically rationalized male view of the exclusive role of women. This duality of women’s emancipation is reflected in the Great Encyclopedia of Medicine, where an article on abortion notes the anxiety caused by increased literacy among women, and with it the cultural demands of women, leading to a desire to restrict childbearing. In order to support the idea of “joyful motherhood,” a medical discourse on the anesthesia of childbirth emerges. In March 1935 at the IX Congress of obstetricians and gynecologists the People’s Commissar of Public Health of the RSFSR G.N. Kaminsky raised the issue of anesthesia of childbirth. It was also from that year that medical, literary and artistic editions with enviable frequency began to publish articles, studies devoted to the issue, the goal – to anesthetize all childbirths in the USSR – was proclaimed. These publications were often filled with anti-German and anti-capitalist propaganda, through which the advantages of socialism over Capitalism and Nazism were demonstrated. At congresses, in journals, and at institute meetings, doctors’ discussions around obstetric anesthesia were accompanied by discussions of shortening the duration of the childbirth process, the prevention and prevention of disease, the admission of nurses to the procedure, and the proper behavior of women during the childbirth process. Articles from medical periodicals of the 1930s, brochures, as well as documents from the funds of the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and the Administration of Obstetric Care of the NKZ USSR allow us to see how the advantages of the Soviet system and socialist way of life were constructed through the problem of labor pain relief. It is also important to trace the development of the discourse on childbirth anesthesia in the USSR in connection with the foreign policy situation and the anti-abortion policy of the Soviet state, and to conclude how successful and widespread this policy was in practice. Considering this subject from the perspective of gender studies and the social history of medicine, I find the use of the term “biopolitics” productive. The central issue of biopolitics is population reproduction. It includes strategies for intervening in collective existence in the name of life and health, ways of subjectivation by which individuals are forced to work on themselves. The Soviet state, through intervention in the reproductive lives of its citizens, sought to realize its goals of population growth, which was necessary to demonstrate the benefits of living in the Soviet Union and to train a pool of builders of socialism. The woman’s body was seen as the object over which the socialist experiment of reproductive policy was being conducted.
keywords: Gender History; The Social History of Medicine; Reproductive policy; Childbirth painrelief