The title promises progress in the history of sexuality (of women) in Russia from the eleventh to the early twentieth centuries. Over the course of the nine centuries, the collective monograph looks at the decline of sexual taboos. It is female sexuality, mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that is analyzed. Male sexuality is not explicitly addressed and when mostly framed as the opposite (free, experienced, promiscuous) to the female side of the story. The two of the authors are well-known historians who have had long careers in women's or gender history in Russia. Natalia Pushkareva (Moscow) and Anna Belova (Tver΄) both draw on their extensive research of the last decades while Natalia Mitsiuk is a young gender and medical historian based in Smolensk who has already authored an impressive amount of publications about motherhood in the Russian provinces. It seems important to note that this book appears at a time in which gender studies are under increasing political pressure in Russia. Those who research homosexuality, for example, have to walk a fine line or be considered as “propagating” homosexuality. Nevertheless, lesbianism plays a part—albeit carefully written and short—in the book under review. This collective monograph could be interpreted as a political statement, particularly when looking at its title, loosely translated as “getting rid of taboos,” at time when sexual taboos are in fact growing.

This book does not necessarily provide the big and new argument one would have never heard of, but it certainly provides us with an astonishing degree of source material, much of which comes from provincial archives. In this sense, this monograph is a treasure trove and must-read for anybody interested in the history of sexuality and medicine in Russia. A lot of hitherto unpublished letters and diaries from the archives garnish the often gruesome and sobering narrative about womanhood in particular. To some degree, the book relies on well-known memoirs and diaries from Anna Labzina, Anna Kern, Andrei Bolotov, and the Bakunins. One central insight of this book is the utter ignorance and un-preparedness with which young noble women entered their marriage in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. When the sheer presence of a man in the same room could (allegedly) get young women pregnant, the male touch was simply incommensurable for many young women, and as Mitsiuk argues, was responsible for many hysteric fits young women suffered from. For too many women, the wedding night was nothing else than experiencing rape, something I had not previously read so impressively described. Particularly intriguing is Mitsiuk's example of S.F. Sharapov, a publicist in the early twentieth century, who collected stories of his male friends and their wedding nights with special regard to the sentiments of their wives. Sharapov interpreted those wedding nights as violence against the women in which men behaved like “wild animals.” Even women who loved their husbands could not digest the amount of sexual intimacy they suddenly encountered. Interestingly, Sharapov did not blame the mothers (whereas the authors sometimes seem to do), but the husbands and their cowardliness in the face of the ignorance in sexual matters in young women. Rather than having an open conversation and showing patience, husbands ignored their wives and thus essentially revived the “feudal ius primae noctis” (244), which never seemed to have existed in Russia, however.

For those interested in sexuality, gender, and morality beyond the noble circles and the urban dwellers, the book has a lot to offer, too. One chapter scrutinizes chastushki and rural sexual morals. Another chapter about the pre-modern period analyzes religious sources in order to reach an understanding of which sexual practices existed, for example, in the thirteenth century (the answer is: basically everything). However, as this chapter makes abundantly clear, the time for living out those sexual practices was extremely short since the many religious holidays and fasting periods reduced the days on which sex was allowed to a mere five to six days a month. The book closes with a discussion about motherhood and contraceptive practices at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter stresses the progressive developments mostly among the emancipated and feminist social circles in urban Russia that were able to conceive of women without imaging them as mothers. When read against the contemporary discussions in Russia today one cannot help but wish that history would repeat itself.