Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran

by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

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.

Genres: Iran, History, Gender, Islam, Feminism, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2011

Reviews

[PassionateReads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, well-written, thoroughly researched.

[شیوا علی نقیان · Rating 5 out of 5]

کتابی بی نظیر با نگاهی تبارشناسانه به مسئله مادری و ملیت که از طریق مطالعه ای تاریخی نشان می دهد چگونه زنان به واسطه امکان مادریشان در ایران، توانستند حقوق اولیه شهروندی مانند اشتغال، تحصیل و نیز حق رای را از آن خود کنند. کاشانی ثابت در این کتاب معتقد است که در دوره پهلوی، بدن زن و یا مادر بستر و محمل اصلی رشد ملیت گرایی و ناسیونالیسم شده است.
کتاب بسیار خواندنی است.....