Catherine is once more being taken seriously as an intellectual, engagee and writer (an inveterate `scribbler', as she called herself and a ruler addicted to `legislomania'). Committed to the values of the philosophes, she believed fervently in the power of enlightened ideas and legislation and energetically strove to put theory into practice by influencing and forming a `public opinion' in Russia sympathetic to her objectives. She wrote moral tales for her grandchildren, school syllabuses and mildly satirical periodicals and comedies for her subjects in the lasting basic conviction that common sense, reason and moral conduct could lead to social progress and nurture a responsive and responsible `civil' society in Russia. Education and enlightenment would create `true sons of the fatherland' and even `a new species of humankind'. In 1769 she founded the Smol'ny Institutue, Russia's first girls' school, for the daughters of the nobility and bourgeoisie. In modelling the Institute on the latest pedagogical theories she showed a concern for the education of women as active (though not equal) contributors in the process of civilising society.
An international essay competition on the question of serfdom was intended to show that the empress held strong abolitionist views and to stimulate thinking in the same direction: the prize essay, recommending abolition, was chosen by Catherine in 1765. By her own very public example of inoculation against smallpox (in contrast to the royal families of France, Spain and Austria who refused to undergo it on religious grounds), she sought both to save lives and to demonstrate the real benefits of the Enlightenment faith in scientific empiricism and humanitarian zeal. Hospitals and the Foundlings' Home (1764) which she established also saved young lives which, in turn, she intended to turn into useful lives. (See Janet Hartley, `Philanthrophy in the Reign of Catherine the Great: Aims and Realities' in Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment.
