The history of the family in the Middle East only began to be written in the 1990s, and often only appears as a tangent to the history of women and gender. The national press and women’s magazines in turn-of-the-century Egypt were saturated with parenting and medical advice targeted at literate middle-class parents, as well as with discussions about the proper place of women. This project investigates the historical construction of the ideology of the modern Egyptian family by tracing the tense emergence of the mother/child dyad in relation to the early feminist project of women’s emancipation. Taking a discursive analytic approach, I look at transformations in women’s writings about the modern Egyptian family and women’s concerns about childrearing in the semi-colonial and colonial contexts of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt. Focusing on women’s contributions in the vernacular newspapers of the end of the nineteenth century, the women’s press, and the scarcely exploited children’s press, I examine how these texts participated in the creation of a canon of child-centered family ideology between 1867 and 1922. Similarly, I trace the evolution of the writings of early feminists such as Huda Shaarawi, Malak Hefny Nassef, Aisha Taimur, Nabawiyya Musa, and May Ziadeh in order to understand how they positioned their political project of emancipation in relation to a modern understanding of the mother/child dyad as the foundational category of the modern family. I argue that women’s participation in public debates on the health and sickness of children and the related issue of their moral upbringing marked particular child and mother bodies as legitimate or illegitimate receptacles of modernity and of citizenship, working to create the child-centered family as a modern category which both enabled and limited the aspirations of early feminists. By studying women’s writings about “The Woman Question” in relation to the then urgent question of children’s health and wellbeing, this research can contribute to the understanding of how Egypt was imagined via a lens of women’s responsibility for children’s welfare. Understanding the debates concerned with healthy motherhood/childhood in modern Egypt can further our understanding of how colonial taxonomies and nationalist aspirations appropriated the bodies of women and children and shaped their lives, and how women actively participated in and resisted these appropriations. Finally, the way in which women writers imagined their emancipatory project in relation to the New Family Ideology has had important implications for generations of Egyptian feminists.