Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran

Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran

While Iranian women have most frequently been viewed through the politics of veiling, Conceiving Citizens interprets modern Iranian politics and society through the history of women's health and sexuality. Drawing on archival documents and manuscript sources from Iran and elsewhere, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet illustrates how debates over hygiene, reproductive politics, and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explained demographic trends and put women at the center of nationalist debates. Exploring women's lives under successive regimes, she chronicles the hygiene campaigns that cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; government policies on contraception and population control; and tensions between religion and secularism. "In the already rich panorama of studies on Iranian women's history in the last two centuries, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet has managed to increase our knowledge on the topic by writing a book based on a new perspective, i.e., the intersection between women's emancipation and the evolution of hygiene and reproductive politics in Iran. Conceiving Citizens is to be welcomed as a contribution to a better understanding of how both modern medicine and nationalist concern impacted on women's education, employment, civil and political rights....The book is well documented, well written, and though it will be of significant interest to specialists in Iranian women's history, it is also recommendable to scholars of modern and contemporary Iranian society and to students of gender and sexuality in the Middle East."--Anna Vanzen, Journal of Social History "Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet's Conceiving Citizens ...is a welcome contribution to Middle East gender and sexuality studies and provides rich potential for comparative studies in other fields... The comprehensive nature of the study is matched by a rigorous methodology and analysis of sources ranging from Iranian treatises on hygiene to European and American accounts to visual images from Persian-language periodicals."--Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi, Journal of the History of Sexuality "In this meticulously researched and elegantly written book, Kashani-Sabet argues persuasively that starting in the nineteenth century a series of issues brought maternalism to the heart of modern Iranian thought, concepts of nationhood, and tasks of a modern government. No other work on Iranian modernity brings these themes together as analytically interlinked in the way this does."--Afsaneh Najmabadi, Harvard University "We have been told that mothers of the Middle East are important, and here is a book that shows us why. Drawing on a rich array of sources, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet puts maternalism at the center of her story. Conceiving Citizens explores health, hygiene, and sexuality in twentieth century Iran, shedding light on such understudied topics as disease and disabilities and making a significant contribution to scholarship."--Beth Baron, author of Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics "Kashani-Sabet's pioneering study of motherhood in modern Iran, rooted in primary research, is a rare contribution to the social history of the Middle East, demonstrating the impact of modern hygiene and science on state formation and policies...In her analysis of gender and politics, she observes the dialectics of power not only from the top but also through the experience of the vulnerable when most exposed."--A. Reza Sheikholeslami, Wadham College, Oxford University " Conceiving Citizens is a comprehensive, well-researched, and accessible work that sees the history of hygiene and reproductive politics as a rich site for doing social history particularly on Iran. In consulting an impressive array of archival documents on Iran, Kashani-Sabet certainly proves her case. Conceiving Citizens is a welcome read that both undergraduates and graduates would enjoy."--Hibba Abugideiri, Bulletin of the History of Medicine Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is Associate Professor of History and director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946 .