Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet (review)

Those interested in the historical experiences of motherhood, specifically in how motherhood was appropriated by ideologies tied to the project of modern statehood, will find great value in Conceiving Citizens. Kashani-Sabet unravels the maternalist and reproductive politics that marked a century-long period, from the late Qajar to the late Pahlavi era. She illustrates how the emphasis on motherhood in Iran spawned maternalism, a social ideology that promoted motherhood, child care, and maternal well-being both within the family and as a nationalist concern. As maternalism became closely tied with the hygiene movement—particularly early on when Iran faced a “crisis of modernity” (p. 28) as a consequence of its military, fiscal, and social troubles and when many Iranians saw hygiene as instrumental to achieving nationhood—a new nationalist vocabulary about citizenship emerged that hinged on patriotic motherhood. “The mother became not just a metaphor for the homeland but a crucial participant in the conception of the nation” (p. 33). Therefore, “women were not just conceiving citizens; they began to conceive of citizenship” (p. 7).

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 (“Hygiene and Citizenship”) sets up the social and intellectual framework for studying hygiene and maternalism. Kashani-Sabet examines the rise of science as part of Iran’s climate of reform and modernists’ ambitions in creating a healthy and clean community. With the threat of deadly disease lurking after a number of outbreaks, a new language of science emerged in Iranian periodicals that invoked hygiene as a symbol of humanism and civilization to a move to improve public sanitation. Hygiene was thus rendered an expression of patriotism. No less significant was the encroachment of Western biomedicine and the scapegoating of traditional midwives and their “unscientific” approach to birthing as a leading cause of infant mortality, as occurred in parallel fashion elsewhere in the Middle East. Midwifery had lost its prestige by the turn of the century, as male physicians and hygienists disparaged midwives as “enemies of public health” (p. 44) for their unempirical methods and superstitions. So threatening was this “crisis of midwifery” to a new generation of patriots that ultimately the state intervened by regulating midwifery and nursing education during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By deconstructing maternalist discourses that targeted mothers and midwives as the primary conduits of hygienic education and practice, part 1 details how child rearing and mothering were increasingly adapted to nationalist pressures and male oversight.

Part 2 (“Marriage, Maternity, and Sexuality”) examines the institutional ways that maternalist discourses pushed their objectives into the public sphere in light of Iranian political transformations (e.g., a constitutional revolution, an expanding consumer market, Pahlavian statehood, etc.). Here, Kashani-Sabet offers the most substantive arguments pertaining to maternalism, as she topically traverses a wide range of social issues that maternalists debated about marriage and sexuality (e.g., celibacy, prostitution, venereal diseases, elixirs, birthing, schooling women as patriotic mothers, and forced unveiling) and which temporally span over half a century, the 1870s to the 1940s. Throughout, the author keeps the reader focused on how maternalist discourses impacted and were impacted by Iranian women. Thus, while the state restricted women’s movements beyond the home and family, “it also emboldened Iranian women to fight and seek respect for their position in society as educators, as participants in civil society, as standard-bearers of patriotism and modernity, and finally as mothers and wives. These enterprises helped extend the ideal of patriotic motherhood to that of patriotic womanhood. The modern Iranian woman would become not just a capable homemaker but also a laborer, an athlete, a teacher, a nurse, or a state employee” (p. 126). Motherhood indeed became an effective pretext for women’s activities, even activism, elsewhere, but always within a nationalist framework.

The last three chapters constitute the final section (“Politics and Reproduction”), which examines the political maturation of women in the...