Abstract

Soviet reproductive politics in Central Asia were a complex site where ethno-racial hierarchies and imperial biopolitics were weaved into shaping the “Soviet society.” This research shifts focus to the historical roots of educated mother figure and how it was constructed through colonial driven reproductive governance. In Uzbekistan, the 1927 unveiling campaign Hujum (meaning attack) aimed at women’s “emancipation”, dismantling Islamic gender norms while promoting a new socialist maternal ideal. The Soviet ideology constructed the “educated mother” through literacy campaigns, “mother heroine” awards for mothers with 10 children and more, maternity leaves, and women’s labour force integration (Kandiyoti, 2007; Northrop, 2004). While such policies led to social transformation, they also imposed Soviet modernity as a colonial civilizing mission (Tlostanova, 2010). However, such governance extended beyond policy into visual and scientific regimes. Soviet propaganda posters idealized motherhood as patriotic labour, linking maternal health, infant care, and hygiene to socialist success. Simultaneously, Soviet anthropologists such as Iasevich and Oshanin carried out state-funded projects photographing and measuring naked Uzbek women to define racialized “body types” and construct a normative female Uzbek subject (Northrop, 2004). The concept of the Soviet "educated mother" in Uzbekistan resonates with global maternalist ideologies from US Republican Motherhood's civic reproduction (Kerber, 1980) to imperial hygiene campaigns sustaining empire (Yuval-Davis, 1994), but with a particular colonialized Central Asian bodies. After unveiling campaign, women in Uzbekistan were symbolically exalted into education, yet materially burdened and expected to give birth to the socialist future, while also contributing to Soviet economic development through compulsory agricultural labour (cotton picking) and factory work. Though the literacy campaigns profoundly expanded women’s education levels, it also functioned as tools for ideological re-socialization. The aim of this paper is to interrogate how reproductive governance in Soviet Uzbekistan operated through the figure of the “educated mother” as a site of both biopolitical control and potential agency. It asks: How were childbirth, contraception, and family-making regulated to shape a Soviet society? Using a postcolonial feminist historiographical lens, the study draws on Soviet-era policy documents, propaganda art, anthropological studies, and oral histories. It critically engages with interdisciplinary scholarship on gender, race, and modernization in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia (Sultanalieva, 2023). This study contributes to understanding Soviet reproductive governance as a tool of imperial control and highlights the need for pluriversal and intersectional approaches to feminist history in Central Asia that position the voices and bodies historically rendered invisible.