This paper evaluates the writings of Rifa`a al-Tahtawi, Ali Mubarak, Muhammad Abduh and Qasim Amin on marriage and the family. These men have been occasionally mis-identified anachronistically as calling for women’s “emancipation.” Rather, they were concerned with the well-being of the conjugal family, which they believed to be the basic unit in society. Demographically, the conjugal family is the equivalent of the simple or nuclear family. In nineteenth-century Europe, and especially in France, it was mistakenly thought to be both a cause and an artifact of modernity. A conjugal family is by definition monogamous, the couple having a companionate relationship. The advent of the modern conjugal family ideal is also associated with a stricter division between public and private or domestic spheres, and the restriction of women to the latter as homemakers and mothers. A sound family life was deemed essential to advancing the nation, since the family was the place where children, the nation’s future, were formed. The idea that, properly educated, women would be better homemakers and mothers had become widely accepted in France by the middle of the century. France, as is well known, was to a much greater extent than any other country the model for Ottoman and Egyptian reform. The four men whose ideas are examined were readers of French, and while some of them traveled to other European countries their exposure to European social discourse was through the medium of French, and consisted largely of French discourse. In writing about the family they were selective in the ideas they adopted and in the Egyptian/Islamic practices they defended. Yet clearly they promoted the conjugal family ideal by advocating such reforms as women’s education, limits on divorce and the practice of monogamy, which they believed would strengthen the family and advance the nation. Nineteenth-century “familism,” not feminism, generated these and other reformist ideas that nowadays are regarded as having advanced the status of women, and which were embraced by the twentieth-century feminist movement.