Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 by Hoffmann David L

Author:Hoffmann, David L. [Hoffmann, David L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780801462849
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2011-10-17T21:00:00+00:00

Infant Care and Childraising

The final step in state efforts to transform the population through control of reproduction was intervention in the realm of infant care and childraising. Once children came to be seen as belonging not only or even primarily to their parents, but rather to the society, nation, or race, governments initiated programs and legislation to ensure infant health and the proper upbringing of children. Health experts and government officials increasingly set norms for care of children and enforced these norms through a range of educational and interventionist programs—maternity care centers, home medical visits, removal of children from parents deemed unsuitable, and extrafamilial youth organizations. Soviet officials shared this more general state concern with infant care and childraising, and adopted similar methods of state intervention, even as the content of their programs diverged somewhat from those in other countries.

Doctors in Western Europe first began to publish works on the medical care and rearing of children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, initially as part of the cult of domesticity that sought to insulate the bourgeois family from the lower classes.167 By the late nineteenth century, concern for infant and child welfare was extended to the entire population, as the health of lower-class children came to be seen as essential to the overall well-being of society. The Parisian physician Alfred Caron coined the term puericulture to refer to the scientific cultivation of infants and children, which he claimed was crucial “from the point of view of improving the species.” One of the leading physicians in France, Adolphe Pinard, subsequently championed puericulture in the 1890s, and made the mother-child diad a crucial sphere of medical care. Pinard’s ideas spread quickly throughout Europe and beyond, and puericulture’s component fields of obstetrics, gynecology, and pediatrics all burgeoned as a result.168 The means by which ideas circulated were once again publications and international meetings. Concerns about infant health and child care received great attention at the International Congress on the Protection of Children, convened in Paris in 1883, in Bordeaux in 1895, and in Brussels in 1913. Pinard addressed the tenth International Congress on Health and Demography in Paris in 1900, and touted his ideas about the importance of prenatal and postnatal care as a means to prevent degeneration.169 One reason that puericulture developed so quickly as a field was that it addressed widespread concerns about degeneration. Although similar in its aims to negative eugenic policies, puericulture offered a benevolent way to ensure the biological fitness of succeeding generations.

The ideas of puericulture subsequently exerted considerable influence among physicians and state officials in Latin America. As one scholar writes, puericulture made the mother-child unit a special site of medical attention and focused on teaching women to raise healthy children for the good of the country. Children were thus presented “as biological-political resources of the nation, and the state was regarded as having an obligation to regulate their health.”170 Also promoting this line of thinking were Pan-American Child congresses, held regularly from 1916 on, that emphasized the need for governments to ensure the welfare of children.

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