Any mom will tell you: there is no shortage of anxiety-inducing advice aimed at new mothers. One might imagine that the cacophony of “expert” voices each promoting a different recipe for raising the healthiest baby is a modern phenomenon, made possible in the West by relative affluence and the proliferation of information technologies. Or one might easily imagine that advice and instruction to new mothers is as old as the hills, a ritual repeated for every new generation of mothers since time immemorial. However, the privileged deployment of knowledge by self-proclaimed experts is a phenomenon that emerges in a moment that appears revolutionary in hindsight for the very concrete fact that it is irreversible. Once on the scene, the self-styled experts never recede, but only proliferate, becoming, one might argue, a hallmark of modernity. In Russia, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a modest – yet entirely novel – flowering of male experts promoting advice on the distinctly female experience of mothering. This article argues that what distinguished these men from the babushki and midwives who doled out advice to mothers in previous eras was their claim to scientific knowledge, their secular goals, their identification with the state, and their gender. This phenomenon in Russia should be understood as a manifestation of pan-European Enlightenment epistemology and intellectual trends, but also as one that combined with processes and impulses specific to the Russian context. Specifically, the growing ambitions of a reforming crown and its expanding state, begun under Peter I and intensified under Catherine II, provided these Russian experts with a raison d’être and at times a crusading zeal. The men who became interested in maternal activities sought to instruct and to influence mothers in their care of infants for the explicitly stated goals of improving the population of the Russian Empire. Whether or not these men believed in the dual missions of expanding the Russian Empire and spreading Enlightenment, which blossomed in the hospitable conditions created by Empress Catherine II, they were certainly savvy enough to use the language of empire-building and Catherine’s version of autocratic Enlightenment to further their own professional goals.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, during a time of increased publishing activity and the growth of a reading public, medical texts written in the vernacular and medical advice literature began to appear in print in Russia. Advice literature on the topic of raising children also found an eager audience in Russia, helped no doubt by promotion from the crown and the literati of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Popular tracts on the upbringing of children and advice to mothers were imported from Europe and translated into Russian, bringing educated and literate Russians into the pan-European campaign to apply Enlightenment principles and discoveries to the project of raising children. Less studied, however, are the works on this topic written in the Russian context, by Russians and for Russian consumption. This article will focus on one contentious aspect of this new campaign to reform maternal practices for the greater good: the issue of maternal breast-feeding. This issue is particularly rich for the historian; its discourse reveals the connections between modernity, empire, and the construction of motherhood in the age of Enlightenment. By deploying the languages of state interests and of “science” (nauk), physicians and men of letters posited themselves as qualified to assess mothering practices and argued that reforming the care and feeding of infants was a matter of imperial importance. In this discourse, mothers were identified as potential agents of the state; their choices regarding infant care would either further or impede the growth of the empire. Thus, efforts to reform the domestic, feminine tasks of caring for infants functioned to connect the private world of the home and the family (and the previously all-female world of midwifery, wet nursing, and child care) to the public, masculine sphere of statecraft and empire-building.^[1]

MOTHERS AND WET NURSES: AN INTRODUCTION

In the contemporary Western world, a new mother must decide whether to feed her infant from a bottle or from her breasts, or some combination thereof. Before the advent of infant formula and glass bottles, for most women there was no choice to be made. Across Europe before the twentieth century, some mothers exercised the option of engaging a woman from a lower echelon of society to perform the task of breast-feeding one’s infant. A wet nurse essentially sold her breast milk to other mothers, in an arrangement that provided income to women who needed it and freedom to women who could afford it. A wet nurse had duties beyond breast-feeding a newborn every few hours; she also provided all infant care during the period of her employment, including diapering, swaddling, bathing, and, the birth mother hoped, a degree of supervision. In some wealthy households, a wet nurse would be engaged to live with the family. In other cases, the infant would be sent to live with the wet nurse for a period of one to three years. This meant that it was not unusual for infants and toddlers to live away from their families and to see their birth mothers only occasionally during their early years.^[2]
While historical studies of wet-nursing, breast-feeding, and infant care in Europe have flourished, these topics have received little attention in the Russian context. Natal’ia Pushkareva’s pioneering work in women’s history has brought the social and cultural history of maternity in Russia into view.^[3] Her work attests to what Catriona Kelly, Iurii Lotman, and O. S. Murav’eva also observe: mothers of the nobility managed the upbringing of their children, but many of the everyday tasks of child-rearing were performed by nurses, nannies, and governesses.^[4] While scholarship, memoirs, and belles lettres indicate that such figures remained prevalent in noble families until the end of the imperial period, the practice of and attitudes toward wet-nursing and breast-feeding remain relatively obscure.
It has been established that women in medieval Russia did employ wet nurses, or kormilitsy in Russian, to feed their infants. In a study comparing medieval childbirth practices and canon law concerning birth, Eve Levin demonstrates that “the church regarded wet nurses favorably.”^[5] After having given birth, a mother engaged a wet nurse to breast-feed the newborn until her own purity could be restored over a period of forty days. Levin’s sources suggest that it was “rare for a new mother to have permanently turned over nursing of an infant to another woman” – unless the mother could not produce milk herself.^[6] How a new mother retained lactation during the forty-day period of abstaining from nursing her infant remains an open question. It is clear, however, that the Orthodox Church recognized wet-nursing as a necessity, both in practice and in canon law, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[7]
At the turn of the eighteenth century, a new voice is heard from the Church on the issue of infant feeding. The metropolitan of Rostov, later known as Saint Dmitrii Rostovskii, who also wrote religious plays, denounced the practice of wet-nursing. Arguing that hiring wet-nursing was a “sin” against nature and against God, Dmitrii warned noble mothers that the practice jeopardized both the physical and the moral health of their children.^[8] His motivations extended, as we might expect, from a religious conception of maternal duty and did not proclaim any benefit to the secular state accruing from maternal breast-feeding. In this respect, his sermon is similar to religious arguments against wet-nursing in the West, which appear to have had a much longer history than in Russia.^[9] Whether Saint Dmitrii’s perspective is indicative of a larger shift in the Church’s attitude toward wet-nursing is not yet known. Secular voices on the issue are difficult to find. In the first half of the eighteenth century, no works were published in Russian that addressed infant feeding or the physical care of young children.^[10] While more research is clearly needed, it is significant to note that wet-nursing seems not to have aroused much discussion prior to the second half of the eighteenth century in Russia, and had not yet claimed the attention of statesmen, physicians, and the crown.

THE NEW RUSSIAN EXPERTS

In sharp contrast to the preceding era, the second half of the eighteenth century produced a significant expansion in literature addressing medicine and public health, including infant and child welfare. Between 1751 and 1800, 205 titles related to medicine were published, constituting a veritable boom by Russian standards.^[11] Catherine’s stimulus to medicine as an institution certainly enabled this development, as did her efforts to promote public health, disease prevention, and the welfare of children.^[12] The Free Economic Society, an organization formed with Catherine’s blessing and helped by her financial gifts, also sponsored publications by medical writers on public health as it affected the peasantry, in keeping with its goals of improving agricultural production.^[13] Most of the writers who contributed to this boom published only one work; fewer than a dozen distinguished themselves as prolific.^[14] Among these leaders in the field, it is significant that six of these men addressed wet-nursing and breast-feeding in their published works. Three of Russia’s most prominent physicians of the era are included in this group: Semen Zybelin, Nestor Maksimovich-Ambodik, and Matvei Peken. The medic Khristian Rost’ also addressed these issues in a publication sponsored by the Free Economic Society. Nikolai Novikov, who worked to promote medicine and public health through the publication of scores of European titles, also authored a prescriptive essay on child-rearing. Lastly, Ivan Betskoi, the architect of Catherine’s educational and child welfare projects, published a work on child-rearing, which borrowed heavily from medical literature of the West.^[15]
The works of these writers all promoted maternal breast-feeding as a means of improving the health and size of the population of the Russian Empire. In contrast to earlier canon law on wet-nursing, these authors are unequivocal in viewing it as a risky practice. They promote maternal breast-feeding, as did Saint Dmitrii before them, but not out of concern for religious duty or spiritual salvation. Instead, these self-styled experts predict that when mothers breast-feed their own infants exclusively and for an extended period, the benefits will grace society, the state, and the Russian Empire. The works reviewed here will be considered within their eighteenth-century context as products of Russian writers (all of these men grew up in Russia and wrote in Russian), who were influenced by and borrowed from their European peers, but who also applied and adjusted their knowledge to their Russian context.^[16] In terms of intended audience, the historian S. M. Grombakh underscores that the categories “scientific literature” and “popular science” were not distinct in this period of Russian history.^[17] Demarcation between amateur and professional production of knowledge in general had not yet become fixed in Russia, or in Europe. Indeed, these men participated in the process of proscribing those boundaries through their publications and claims to scientific knowledge.
The view of the aggregate benefits to the well-being of the state and empire owes something to the prevailing economic theories of the age, as well as Catherine’s promotion of Cameralism as a means to achieving prosperity in Russia. The physician Nestor Maksimovich-Ambodik, known by this nom de plume to contemporaries, addressed the topic of breast-feeding in his six-volume work The Art of Midwifery, first in Volume I (1784) on women’s anatomy, pregnancy, and birth, and again in Volume V (1786) on child-rearing.^[18] Writing of birth in general, he says it ought to be a happy event not only for the family but also for “society,” which grows in numbers with each new member. Birth is not only a private issue, but a societal, public concern.^[19] To this end, the authority that Maksimovich-Ambodik cites at length is not biblical or Greek in origin, but a contemporary, Russian authority: Catherine’s Instruction. It is interesting to note that he refers to her Instruction as though it were already law, Ulozhenie novykh zakonov, rather than as a guide for the drafting of future legislation. He quotes directly from Chapter 22, section 226 on increasing the population of Russia, “What a flourishing situation there would be for this world power [derzhava] if this destruction [infant deaths] could be averted or prevented through wise institutions.”^[20] He also constructs infant death as an “overt harm” done to “the entire state.”^[21] This is the context that Maksimovich-Ambodik establishes for his entire oeuvre; the goal of his advice is to save infant lives not only for their own sake but also to increase the population of Russia and thus the economic strength and political power of the Russian state. In this respect, Maksimovich expresses the Physiocratic notion that the wealth of a nation or empire was determined by its ability to maximize agricultural labor. He also represents the Cameralist discourse that informs Catherine’s Instruction: the goal of governance was understood as the maximization of the resources available to the state, most especially the population.
To this end, Maksimovich-Ambodik has much to say about the importance of maternal breast-feeding in preventing infant death. The reasoning he provides goes beyond simply promoting infant welfare. Like Dmitrii, Maksimovich-Ambodik argues that women’s anatomy was designed explicitly for feeding their offspring, although the doctor references nature where the metropolitan credits God. Departing further from the language of religion, Maksimovich-Ambodik argues that it is a woman’s “civic duty” to nurse her own children. To him, maternal breast-feeding is political.^[22] In the chapter of his work on midwifery titled “On the Duty of the Mother Concerning Suckling,” he writes that “civil, natural, and moral law” compel mothers to breast-feed their own infants.^[23] More than once he posits the idea that breast-feeding is a “civic” duty, perhaps one that should be enforced by state law. He writes: “Every mother is required, by natural and civil laws, to feed her own offspring from her own breasts.”^[24] Maksimovich-Ambodik’s references to civil law suggest that he views the issue of who nurses an infant as a concern worthy not only of the state’s attention, but even of legislation. In this respect, he anticipates developments in both the French and Prussian contexts, where laws concerning maternal breast-feeding are entered in the books in 1793 and 1794, almost a decade after the publication of Maksimovich-Ambodik’s works.^[25]
Like Maksimovich-Ambodik, the physician Semen Zybelin also construed maternal infant care as a matter important to the state, in particular to the goal of increasing the population. A professor on the medical faculty at Moscow University, Zybelin gave a public lecture on maternal breast-feeding that was later published as a short book titled On the Method for Preventing the Chief Cause of the Slow Population Growth of the People, Consisting in the Improper Food Given to Infants in Their First Month of Life.^[26] The title itself shows very clearly that Zybelin understood the issue not as a personal, moral, or private familial matter, but as an issue so vital to state interests that it warranted a campaign to correct bad practices. Like Maksimovich-Ambodik, he explicitly cites Catherine’s Instruction to establish the political importance of his work. Even more explicitly than Maksimovich-Ambodik, Zybelin argues that the issue of who feeds infants and what they are fed is central to increasing the Russian population and therefore a political and imperial concern.
The size and health of the population, Zybelin argues, directly affects all of the goals of the empress’s Instruction; the success of Catherine’s reforms depends on having a large enough population to carry them out. Referring to the empress’s plans, he writes: “for all of this, without sufficient numbers of people, as the main instrument toward each undertaking, is not easily achieved.”^[27] He also credits Catherine with leading the way toward reforms in child-rearing by including in the Instruction suggestions “on how to increase and strengthen the fatherland by increasing the population.”^[28] Zybelin provides a statistical comparison of number of births compared to number of deaths, and age at death, determining: “it is now possible to conclude that the slowness of the increase of the narod, or its great decrease, begins from infancy, and more in the first year from birth than in the second or third.”^[29] Zybelin enumerates the usual causes of death in infancy, but ultimately concludes that mothers are to blame for the greatest danger: “for usually among the narod on the second or third day after birth they start to give heavy, thick, and indigestible foods to infants.”^[30] Women are identified as the custom-keepers who mistakenly, “out of ignorance or simplicity,” believe that infants are not satisfied by human milk alone.^[31] He makes an argument based on the laws of nature: “But I am asked what should infants be fed so that they will be contented, will be strengthened, and will grow? The answer is so well-known to all, that it would seem unnecessary to demand an explanation from me: for nothing other than nature prepares a special juice [sok] in the mother’s body for this [purpose].”^[32] Zybelin arrives at the same prescription as Maksimovich-Ambodik: in keeping with natural law – and for the good of the Russian state – all mothers should breast-feed their infants exclusively and for an extended period of time. By bolstering his argument with statistics on number of births and mortality by age, Zybelin demonstrates an early modern “attempt to bridge the public and private domains” through demographic analysis.^[33] Through Zybelin’s analysis and argumentation, the intimate, prosaic aspects of individual lives are thus transformed into trends or facts that collectively impinge on the health of the aggregate population.
In addition to physicians like Maksimovich-Ambodik and Zybelin, other writers and statesmen engaged the issue of infant care and feeding. Nikolai Novikov and Ivan Betskoi were two such prominent writers and publishers who actively promoted the advice of physicians in their printed works. Like their physician peers, Novikov and Betskoi also understood this issue as an imperial and societal concern. Novikov, writing for an educated, noble audience, sought to draw parents’ attention to the importance of the earliest months of child-rearing and to convince them to follow the advice of physicians rather than custom or fashion: “[O]ur readers should believe us and the skillful doctors, according to whose words we are writing.”^[34] He places all of his advice within the frame of improving “the state,” arguing in the first sentence of his work that child-rearing is more than a family matter: “it is recognized that the upbringing of children is as highly important for the state as it is for every particular family.”^[35] On the issue of who should feed the newborn infant, he acknowledges that “mother’s milk should always be preferred.” Nonetheless, he recognized that many in his audience would hire wet-nurses rather than nurse their own infants. He writes that if a mother was unable to breast-feed “or does not want to feed her infant herself,” then a suitable wet-nurse should be hired. Novikov then provides detailed instructions on how to ensure one’s infant will receive “good” milk.^[36]
Ivan Betskoi addressed the issue of infant feeding and wet-nursing in two different contexts. He published advice on child-rearing and he addressed the issue in practice at the Moscow Foundling Home. In 1766, he published Brief Instructions, Selected from the Best Authors [...] On the Raising of Children.^[37] Intended for a noble audience, the very first set of rules gives advice on selecting the proper wet-nurse for a newborn infant. Betskoi recommended that parents consider a wet-nurse’s physical and moral qualities: “Select a wet-nurse, to the extent possible, who is healthy, virtuous, without silly pretenses, with scarlet red gums and white teeth, who is neat, tidy and agile; and exclude all redheads.”^[38] Betskoi would try to implement his own advice at the foundling homes, with disastrous effects. In 1779, he wrote to the chief doctor of the Moscow Foundling Home that infant deaths there could be prevented if only the right wet-nurses could be found: “the type of woman is needed who would be a perfect mother for each child; whose heart would be fully committed to the children – and who would not need to complain about the pay. But if such women cannot be found, then everything will be in vain.”^[39] Like Novikov, Maksimovich-Ambodik, and Zybelin, Betskoi found himself making arguments about maternity, infant care, and the needs of the state.

POPULATION ISSUES, MOTHER’S MILK, AND THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

These men had in common a view of “mother’s milk” as central to the population goals of the state. In this respect, they reflect pan-European concerns about depopulation. Montesquieu perhaps most famously promoted the notion that the population in France was in danger of actually declining.^[40] The eighteenth-century Physiocrats believed that agricultural surplus alone produced a nation’s wealth. Thus, a nation’s wealth could be sustained and increased only through population growth, an idea that in turn contributed to natalist viewpoints.^[41] What is interesting and worthy of note, however, is that both Zybelin and Maksimovich-Ambodik cite Catherine’s Instruction as the inspiration for their works, rather than prominent Physiocrats or Cameralists. If we adopt Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, Catherine creates through the power of the crown the “linguistic field” of state power and population concerns. In this way, the speech of the physicians acquires symbolic power within the Russian political context, while it might also have helped to produce material power in the form of financial support from the crown.^[42] The Europeans might have created the broader discourse of populationism, but Catherine sets the parameters of this linguistic field in Russia, and proselytizers like Maksimovich-Ambodik and Zybelin articulated their own authority with explicit reference to it.
Here we might also pause to consider how all of the men writing on the importance of improving Russia’s population were adopting a perspective that also represents what Foucault termed “governmentality.”^[43] In his essay by this name, Foucault argues that in the eighteenth century a shift takes place in the models of rule in Europe from a familial paradigm to a conception of managing a population for the benefit of the government. In Foucault’s conception people were thus atomized, viewed not as dependent parts of family units, but rather as individual units that together constituted the population of the nation. In both Maksimovich-Ambodik’s work and that of Zybelin, it is not only the crown’s interest that they address, construct, and promote; they are self-consciously adopting the view point of an abstraction, whether presented as “the state,” “society,” or “the nation.”
We might conclude, then, with reference to Foucault, that these Russians prove they were shoulder-to-shoulder with their European peers in beginning to view the population as such. However, recent work on the practice of Cameralism in German contexts suggests another interpretation worth considering. Andre Wakefield argues that German Cameralists in fact ought to be understood as engaging in a kind of propaganda that served to further their careers and self-interests. Rather than Enlightened bureaucrats working diligently to implement the science of government for the prosperity of all, these state servitors used the language of Cameralism to promote their own careers and line their own pockets.^[44] For these Russian proselytizers, then, perhaps the expansion of state power and their professional interests were mutually reinforcing.
This issue is also important because it relates to questions of national and imperial identity. When Russians began to imagine themselves as belonging to an abstract nation is one consideration, as is the tension between national and imperial identities. The issues of interpretation are complex in part because the identities were not mutually exclusive. The writers here might be added to the voices considered in the classic work on the issue of Russian national consciousness by Hans Rogger.^[45] S. M. Grombakh argues that Russian medical writers in general in the eighteenth century exhibited in their works “a love toward the fatherland [and] the aspiration to serve it.”^[46] Zybelin, more than any other Russian writer on upbringing, explicitly develops the theme of population management and state power. He grounds his treatise in the idea that Russia is competing with other European nations. To bolster his claims of urgency, he cites Catherine’s Instruction as proof that the empress would be grieved “if some other nation on the earth were to prosper more than ours.”^[47] He imagines a future in which Russia, led by Catherine, is first among all nations, yet also leading other nations to a brighter future: “Bring peace and give your wise counsel, which flows from the mouth of your Sovereign, to the universe, Russia! … [S]ucceed under HER wise reign, open prosperity to all, give charity to all, for your own glorification and for the perfection of well-being for all of Humanity!”^[48] This spirit of national or imperial pride informs the rest of Zybelin’s work.
In a fine example of Enlightenment governmentality, Zybelin assembles a great number of statistics to propel his arguments about the urgency of addressing population growth and reforming infant care. Drawing extensively on both European and Russian data, he concludes that the vast majority of deaths occur before the age of four, and most of these during the first year of life:

“If we now compare these foreign notes and observations to Russia, then we will see similarly that death steals incomparably more infants than those already in adulthood: for example, in the Ukrainian guberniia of Slobodskaia in 1774 out of 13,688 deceased, 1,519 infants of a year old died, 2 years 941, 3 years 592, 4 years 328, 10 years 104, 20 years 102, and 30 years 116.”^[49]

Zybelin uses his data to conclude that Russia is actually competing quite effectively with European nations in terms of population growth. He writes in an extended footnote: “It is worthy of comment that compared to foreign States, fewer infants die in Russia, and everywhere many more are born [than in other states]. […] Our Fatherland, in fertility and long life and in many other advantages, is therefore superior.” Zybelin argues that the first months of life deserve greater attention, as they claim the greatest proportion of lives. In Russia, he writes, the first months of infants’ lives are particularly hazardous because they often coincide with “cold months [and] damp times of year.”^[50] Thus, Zybelin posits that Russia is superior to other European nations in the rate of population growth, but this must be safeguarded and improved upon, with methods specific to Russia’s context. Enter the idealized “natural mother,” with the responsibility (and power) to raise Russia to new heights.

THE NATURAL MOTHER

While various philosophers, moralists, and physicians had argued in favor of maternal breast-feeding since antiquity, the second half of the eighteenth century produced an unprecedented flood of texts in English and in French, a fact that warrants viewing this literature as constituting a campaign to alter the behavior of mothers.^[51] Rousseau’s Emile perhaps most famously promoted maternal breast-feeding as a “natural” imperative of motherhood. Some have argued that breast-feeding came to be seen as an essential maternal duty only after the publication of Emile in 1762.^[52] Four years prior, Carl Linneaus (also a practicing physician) coined the term “mammalia” and included it in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. Londa Schiebinger argues that his choice of this term should be considered a “political act” that “venerated the maternal breast at a time when doctors and politicians had begun to extol the virtues of mother’s mik.”^[53] Indeed, Rousseau likely took his recommendations regarding maternal breast feeding from physicians. George Sussman sees the popularity of Emile as indicative of the zeitgeist it captured.^[54]
Historians have analyzed European arguments in favor of maternal breast-feeding as part of a larger critique of elite women and their relationship to luxury.^[55] French women of the aristocracy were less likely to have healthy infants in part because their love of fashion led to overly tight corseting, which Madame de Puisieux argued was because “the noble parts, which are too confined, spoil and dry up.”^[56] The physician William Cadogan, who wrote for an English audience, but was translated into Russian via a German version of the text, writes that mothers of the aristocracy irreparably weaken their children by keeping them in excessive heat and luxury for their first month of life; then they doom them by sending them away to live with a wet-nurse in a radically different environment: “this Hot-bed Plant is sent out into the Country, to be rear’d in a leaky House, that lets in Wind and Rain from every Quarter. Is it any wonder the Child never thrives afterwards?”^[57] In his Essay on Women, Antoine-Léonard Thomas argued that, owing to immoral salon sociability, “the two sexes were denatured.” Women avoided maternal duty altogether: “Among a people in whom the spirit of society is carried so far, domestic life is no longer known. Thus all the sentiments of Nature that are born in retreat, and which grow in silence, are necessarily weakened. Women are less often wives and mothers.”^[58] Dena Goodman writes that while “salon women” were very serious about their intellectual study and conversation, they were working against some male writers, like Rousseau, who associated elite women with luxury, frivolity, and corrupt society.^[59]
Read against this critique of aristocratic women, the campaign for maternal breast-feeding seems equally about proscribing women’s gender roles as it was about infant welfare. Steinbrugge writes that through the eighteenth-century reconsideration of “female identity” one viewpoint became dominant:

“[I]t was precisely the great significance attributed to women’s physical nature that, in conjunction with physiocratic discourse, led to an unprecedented reduction of woman to the creatural. …[T]he woman who emerged from reflexions about female nature was not a full individual but a being viewed solely in terms of her sex.”^[60]

Steinbrugge argues that this reduction of “woman” to a biological definition led to the identification of women with the emotional, moral realm of the private sphere, and to their segregation from the realm of public action, rationality, and masculinity.^[61] It is a short step from here to the full-flowering in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century of the ideology of “Republican Motherhood” and the “Cult of Domesticity,” as historians have termed the rise of the maternal image that linked women’s civic duty to child-bearing and -rearing in republican contexts.^[62] Convincing the public that mothers should be at home, breast-feeding their infants every few hours, rather than out in mixed-gender social contexts, seems one part of a larger movement by male intellectuals, physicians, and statesmen toward ascribing (or re-ascribing) women to the domestic realm. In the French context especially, the discourse on breast-feeding was highly politicized; by the end of the century women were excluded from politics and the public sphere.^[63]
Viewed in the broader European context, the Russian writers promoting breast-feeding should be seen as quite current. Russian texts on the topic were appearing in print during the same era as the leading French and English publications. This is worth noting in part because some eighteenth-century Europeans held impressions of Russia as barbaric, uncivilized, inhospitable, and worse.^[64] The Encyclopedie on Russia, while praising the Westernizing advances of Peter the Great, also warned that his reforms “have not yet sunk such profound roots, that some interval of barbarism might not be able to ruin this beautiful edifice, undertaken in an empire depopulated and despotic, where nature never spreads its benign influences.”^[65] When Mary Wollstonecraft sought a comparison that represented the most egregious example of patriarchy reinforced by violence, she referred to Russia. She wrote that if women, once emancipated, were shown to be undeserving of their freedom, “it will be expedient to open a fresh trade with Russia for whips: a present which a father should always make to his son-in-law on his wedding day, that a husband may keep his whole family in order by the same means.”^[66] While the Russian writers considered here were formulating arguments similar to their Western counterparts, however, it would be incorrect to conclude that these Russians were simply transferring European ideas to a Russian audience. These Russian writers were very conscious of the social and political context in which they were writing. With this in mind, we turn to a discussion of the “good” or “natural” mother trope, which reveals some of the tensions and issues specific to the Russian social and political context.
The trope of the natural mother emerges from these Russian texts as an ideal type. Immediately after giving birth, she puts her baby to her breast. She is “content” to breast feed her own child, staying at home and breast-feeding “every 3 to 4 hours.”^[67] Through her milk she provides the perfect “medicine” for her newborn infant, eliminating the need for harsh purgatives.^[68] She gives her infant no other food until he or she has plenty of teeth; she decides to wean only when a nearly full set will allow for the chewing of solid food.^[69] She has beautiful breasts, which makes her quite “pleasing” to the male sex.^[70] She loves her child, but always within reason, avoiding an indulgent love and a suffocating “endless tenderness.”^[71] She “is the example of a true mother and the example of motherly affection! [...] How rare are such examples of motherly love in our own age!”^[72] This romantic, yet enlightened ideal mother, who followed both natural law and the dictates of medical writers, most likely was not drawn from the nobility, given the writers’ explicit criticism of noble mothers for their use of wet-nurses. To what extent, if at all, did these writers imagine the natural mother as a peasant?
Rost’, Peken, and Zybelin all acknowledge that peasant women were doing something that noblewomen generally were not (at least in the writers’ conception): they were breast-feeding their own children. The physician Rost’ paints a rather lovely picture of the peasant mother, and leaves it to his reader to perceive the difference for the infants of a “natural mother” and her opposite:

“Beginning from birth, the upbringing and manner of life of every person is different: the newborn infant of well-to-do families is fed by a wet-nurse, but among the simple folk [prostoi narod] a mother is content to feed her own child with milk from her own breast, whose strength is so effective and perfect for drawing off and cleansing the pungent phlegm from the stomach of the newborn, for which the well-to-do usually use small, polished millstones, English magnesium, rhubarb syrup, or other similar substances.”^[73]

Rost’ also writes that peasant women are healthier, stronger, and give birth more easily and have fewer problems breast-feeding. He reasons that “[w]omen of the simple folk have stronger builds because of almost continual movement during work and because they always take the same foods with great moderation and abstinence.”^[74] Rost’ is alone, however, in such an overtly positive portrayal of the peasant mother. Interestingly, Rost’ most likely had the most firsthand contact with peasant mothers, as he traveled throughout rural areas of the empire as a lekar’.
While Zybelin sees the Russian countryside as fertile and, in general, a healthier environment with respect to child-rearing, he does not trust peasant mothers to know how best to care for their infants. None of the childhood diseases are as dangerous to infants as the ill-informed practices of their peasant mothers, he writes. He explains that young infants need only their mother’s milk and “not what is usually given, especially among the simple folk, the raw oats boiled with milk under the name of kasha.” This folk tradition, based on the mistaken belief that babies are hungry for solid food, “kills, in a manner similar to a slow poison, a great number of infants.”^[75] For Zybelin, the problem with the peasant mother is that she needs instruction and supervision to understand what is “natural” and therefore good for her infant.
Maksimovich-Ambodik’s ideal mother strikes one as a romantic creation rather than a realistic example drawn from observation. The degree of romanticization in Maksimovich-Ambodik’s conception of maternal breast-feeding is revealed in the following excerpt. The natural mother understands her child completely:

“A true mother, having successfully given birth, quickly puts her child to her own breast. Holding him in her embrace, with motherly love, she continually admires him. The child cannot speak, cannot express his needs with words; but a true mother already guesses and knows all of his desires through secret, tender warmth of feeling. Before she became a mother, nature planted this feeling in her heart.”^[76]

A wet-nurse cannot supply this love, Maksimovich-Ambodik writes. When in need of a positive example of an actual loving mother, Maksimovich-Ambodik refers to the animal kingdom or to “primitive peoples” living far away on other continents.^[77] In the following example, he clearly means to shame noblewomen by suggesting that even animals are better mothers: “All animals, which willingly nurse their own offspring from their own bodies, could serve as examples to every expectant mother.”^[78] Maksimovich-Ambodik suggested that Russian mothers should look to unenlightened mothers for models of good mothering: “[W]ild, unenlightened people always nurse their own children and in general do not know the diseases from which many of our newborns suffer.”^[79] However, the Russian peasantry does not figure in Maksimovich-Ambodik’s mind as an example of natural and wild people worthy of emulation. Rather, the rural countryside is represented as barbaric and superstitious, with child-rearing under the influence of ignorant baby.
It is interesting that Russian peasant mothers do not figure as positive “primitive” examples in Maksimovich-Ambodik’s or Zybelin’s texts, but rather as negative, ignorant mothers. In contrast, their French and English counterparts in the campaign for maternal breast-feeding do cite the rural lower classes in their own countries as positive “primitive” examples. In contrast to the women of the nobility and middle classes, the mothers of the lower orders are praised by Cadogan and Rousseau for providing a healthier upbringing for their children, beginning with the maternal breast. Cadogan’s comparison is vivid and worth quoting, especially because this tract was translated and published in Russia:

“In the lower class of mankind, especially in the country, Disease and Mortality are not so frequent, either among the Adult, or the Children. Health and Posterity are the Portion of the Poor, I mean the laborious: the want of superfluity confines them more within the Limits of Nature.... The Mother who has only a few Rags to cover her Child loosely, and little more than her own Breast to feed it, sees it healthy and strong, and very soon able to shift for itself; while the puny Insect, the Heir and Hope of a rich Family, lies languishing under a Load of Finery, that overpowers his limbs, abhorring and rejecting the Dainties he is cramm’d with, ‘till he dies a Victim to the mistaken Care and Tenderness of his fond Mother.”^[80]

Rousseau also constructed the mothers of the French countryside as superior to women of the urban nobility. Were it not for the rural poor, he writes, Europe would become depopulated: “And what would become of your cities if women living more simply and more chastely far away in the country did not make up for the sterility of the city ladies?” He also praised French peasant mothers, who willingly nursed their children, to urban mothers who avoided breast-feeding in order to pursue leisure activity: “Prudent husbands, […] you are fortunate that women more continent than yours can be found in the country, more fortunate yet if the time your wives save [by not breast-feeding] is not destined for others than you!”^[81] Russian writers were happy to criticize noblewomen on similar grounds, but they stopped short of idealizing peasant women.

CONCLUSION: SOCIAL COMMENTARY IN AN AUTOCRATIC CONTEXT

Other than Dr. Rost’, who gently and implicitly suggests that peasant mothers do better for their children, the Russian medical authors do not come close to the social commentary made by Rousseau, Cadogan, Linneaus, and others. To praise peasant mothers, to raise them as the ideal to be imitated by noblewomen, in the context of an autocracy supported by serfdom, might not have been within the realm of the imaginable for most of these writers. All of the Russian medical writers, while they referenced natural law to argue for maternal breast-feeding, accepted the social hierarchy of Russia as legitimate. Novikov disdained the lower orders in some of his commentary, as when he writes of the practice of some wet-nurses and nannies giving infants alcoholic drinks to make them sleep: “Vodka is not given to the children of those social positions [sostoianiia] for whom we are writing.”^[82] Furthermore, all of the Russian writers were dependent on the state for their positions. Zybelin was a professor on the Medical Faculty at the state’s Moscow University. Maksimovich-Ambodik held various state positions throughout his career, including a position on the board of the state Medical Collegium and as director of the state’s midwifery courses. Rost’ writes in his introduction that he had been in government service “to the Russian Empire” since 1745, and had traveled throughout the country as a medic.^[83] Novikov’s publishing was also state-subsidized. With the exception of Betskoi, these men were neither wealthy noblemen nor personally connected to the empress. Instead they depended on their education and status within the civil service for their positions and salaries. In the eighteenth-century Russian political and social context, there were limits to what could be said – or perhaps even imagined. It was not possible to tell noblewomen to be like peasant women; thus the peasant mother could not be made entirely into a heroine.
These Russian writers identified with the goals of the state and the crown. Whether they believed in these goals or not, they articulated them as their own personal and professional goals and benefited from their adoption of Catherine’s language of reform. Unlike Rousseau, so influential in the West European discourse of motherhood and breast-feeding, who adamantly objected to raising children for the good of either society or the French state, these men promoted maternal breast-feeding as a means of achieving a superior Russian society, nation, and state. It is nearly impossible to imagine one of the Russian authors considered here writing as Rousseau does: “Public instruction no longer exists and can no longer exist, because where there is no fatherland, there can no longer be citizens. These two words, fatherland and citizen, should be effaced from modern languages.”^[84] Rousseau then dismisses politics altogether, as having nothing to do with raising children. For the Russian writers, these categories, fatherland and citizen, have everything to do with their reason for writing. However they imagined the state, society, or the nation, they all imagined these entities – rather than private families or individuals – as the ultimate beneficiaries of their child-rearing reforms. This is a striking contrast both from those holding earlier Russian viewpoints and from contemporary French and English maternal breast-feeding proponents. Even Novikov, sometimes posited as a Russian liberal, has much greater ambitions than the liberation of the individual self through a natural upbringing. Like Catherine, he hopes to raise good “citizens” who will improve society and the state.^[85]
The solutions that Maksimovich-Ambodik and Zybelin proposed were dependent on state intervention, unlike those of Rousseau and Cadogan. Where the latter hoped to influence parents, mostly by petitioning husbands to exercise influence over their wives and convince them to breast-feed, Maksimovich-Ambodik and Zybelin conceived ambitious, far-reaching state reforms. Maksimovich-Ambodik established midwifery institutes for the training of “learned” midwives. Zybelin hoped to create a system of supervision of peasant women, in which one mother was appointed to educate and assist the other women in the village in infant care. Rousseau imagines that mothers should be given written instructions on how to nurse and raise their infants, but the act of converting the women is left to husbands. Zybelin proposes a different solution, one that sounds a bit more practical and yet relies upon the intervention of an extra-village authority:

“It would not be without use if for this reason in the countryside one babka was always chosen from the women of the place, who had given birth herself and was more learned than the others, who would be in this instance [regarding maternal instruction on infant feeding] and in the care of the infants, especially during summertime when the mothers are serving in the field, like a supervisor [nadziratel’nitsa] for her sex and for infants.”^[86]

Zybelin thus imagines a woman in each village as, in essence, an agent of enlightenment, who would act as educator and supervisor of other mothers in peasant villages. Who would appoint this woman, “more learned than the others,” to act as educator and supervisor? Zybelin assumes an external authority would intervene. Catherine’s Reform of Local Administration in 1775 provisioned for hospitals near major towns and for local boards of social welfare.^[87] Zybelin’s recommendation, published the same year, seems a reasonable extension of these new local institutions.
We might also wonder about the symbolic impact of a woman and mother on the throne. In all of these texts, Catherine is the “mother of the fatherland,” from whom “all bliss flows” – like mother’s milk. Not only is mother’s milk the source of hope for the nation’s future, according to these medical writers, for Zybelin it even offered an alternative to war. He professed that improved infant care and the subsequent rise in population would make it unnecessary to expand the empire through force.

“Without conquests I say! For it is known to the whole world that the Russian AUTOCRATESS is peace-loving; HER philanthropic soul wishes not for foreign acquisitions, but as the benefactress to the human race, the voice of nature, the voice of its heart, and the voice of those who come running to her for shelter, she ends the strife of others; wishing peace and calm for the whole world.”^[88]

The political content is evident in this excerpt, in which he preaches population growth through reforms to infant feeding practices, not war. Thus, the physician, as the agent of change, plays a critical role in the political destiny of the empire.
It is surely the case that in Russia medicine developed as an institution of the autocracy. Peter established the first medical training schools while also creating an institutional structure for entry into the profession. Is it surprising then, that medical writers adopt a statist analysis in their assessment of infant mortality? Perhaps not. But as Andreas Renner reminds us, however, the fact of autocratic support did not guarantee the success or status of physicians in Russia, who were working in the eighteenth century to establish rather than preserve, as in the West, the privileges attached thus to their careers in medicine.^[89] What is compelling is how the Russian-born physicians thus became a new cultural and social type. In the impulse to critique and advise mothers, midwives, and wet nurses, with reference to scientific claims to buttress their advice, these physicians, and the writers who promoted doctors as experts, actively worked to construct a new type of authority in Russia. Finally, the prism through which they understood their self-fashioning was informed by Western medicine, yet distinctly Russian in content. These men wrote from the periphery in Europe, yet understood themselves as both European and Russian. They referenced a linguistic field created in Europe by Montesquieu, Diderot, Justi, Linneaus, and others – but the parameters of that linguistic field were set by Catherine. As she noted:

“If you go to a village and ask a peasant how many children he has he will say ten, twelve, and sometimes even twenty. How many of them are alive? He will say one, two, three, rarely four. This mortality should be fought against, one should consult able doctors, those of a more philosophical turn of mind than the average, and introduce a general rule for the preservation of life among infants which is so neglected now; they run about half-naked in the ice and snow; the robust survive, but how many of them die! And what a loss for the State!”^[90]

The few Russian writers considered here were indeed a tiny elite, yet the fact that they put pen to paper, imagined great interventions with grand outcomes, and played to a Russian educated audience indicates energy and initiative beyond what was required of them by the state bureaucracy in which they served. The construction of medical expertise in the realm of infant feeding, in which scientific knowledge was coded as masculine, and feminine ignorance was figured as threatening to the health of the state, is thus a story belonging to the histories of gender, science, and national identity in Russia.