Pregnancy, Motherhood And/as/or Dissent: The Soviet Micro-rhetorics of Gender

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on the rhetoric of reproduction, childbirth, and motherhood has mostly focused on a U.S. context. Drawing on oral histories that we collected from a small group of Estonian women who gave birth during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, we argue that women’s experiences of childbirth in Soviet maternity hospitals and during the postpartum period can be interpreted as micro-rhetorical interactions through which arguments about the worth or value of a particular identity are communicated implicitly and intangibly. The gendered nature of these micro-rhetorical interactions helps to explain the often observed-upon gap between the official Soviet rhetoric of gender equality and the persistently patriarchal nature of Soviet society. Ultimately, we argue that examining the rhetoric of pregnancy and childbirth in an authoritarian political context also necessitates rethinking the functions of and possibilities for rhetorical agency.

Notes

1. All translations by Eve Annuk and Marika Seigel. We have tried to keep as close to the original Estonian syntax as possible in order to let the women’s voices come through

2. We are grateful to RR reviewers Heather Adams and an anonymous reviewer whose feedback helped enormously in developing and sharpening our arguments in this article. This article was supported by the European Union Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence in Estonian Studies) and it is associated with the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research research project IUT 22-2 and research project EKM 8-2/20/1 (Sociality of Life Writing and Literary Culture: an Archival Perspective). The research was also supported by a Scholarship and Creativity Grant from Michigan Technological University. We are grateful to the all the women who shared their stories with us.

3. We received IRB approval for these interviews (Project Title: 851541-1) on January 7, 2016.

4. The Soviet non-pharmacological method of pain relief in childbirth (known as a Lamaze method in Western countries) was introduced in 1951, when “On February 13, 1951, the Soviet Minister of Public Health [Minzdrav] E. Smirnov issued Order No. 142, which commanded the constituent republics of the USSR to utilize the psychoprophylactic method (a.k.a. PPM) of pain relief in all Soviet childbirth facilities[…]By June 1, 1951, PPM was to be practiced in all Soviet birth facilities, while all medical institutes were ordered to develop educational programs for training medical students and practicing obstetricians in psychoprophylaxis by the start of the new school year on September 1. In inimitable Soviet style, with Order No. 142 psychoprophylaxis became the official method of childbearing the USSR.” (Michaels 4)

5. Interviews were conducted in Estonian; Eve Annuk and Marika Seigel translated the interview excerpts into English for this article.

6. In a 1968 article in The New York Times, this publication of Spock’s book in the Soviet Union is attributed to his being a Soviet hero for his opposition to the Vietnam war,“ further speculating that “many of Dr. Spock’s ideas will be revolutionary for Russian mothers.” (10)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Michigan Technological University [REF E49395]; European Union Regional Development Fund [Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies, TK145].