Alongside contemporaries elsewhere, writers in the Arabic women’s press between became transfixed between 1900 and 1939 by the problem of the female body and its newly-assigned domestic labor: pregnancy, breastfeeding, childcare, and housekeeping. Journals published by women in Cairo and Beirut framed these tasks as feminized social labor to be governed by embodied sentiment and affect and separated from both the market and the state. Even as male nationalists came to understand control of capital accumulation and the conditions of market exchange as essential to state sovereignty, theorists of childrearing and domesticity continued to insist that social and political reproduction—the generation of workers’ bodies and citizens’ minds—must be women’s unpaid work. This paper argues that these discussions about the laboring capacity of the female body represented a “boundary struggle” between economic production and social reproduction, i.e., “the work of socializing the young, building communities, and producing and reproducing the shared meanings, affective dispositions, and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation” (Fraser 2017). Nancy Fraser and other feminist theorists have long insisted that social-reproductive activity is “absolutely necessary to the existence of waged work, the accumulation of surplus value, and the functioning of capitalism as such.” Capitalist society, then, is constituted, not merely reflected, by boundary struggles over production and social reproduction. This paper, in turn, argues that key categories of colonial political economy—labor and value—were forged not only in the fields and the banks, but in the crucible of gendered debates about what kinds of work could be commodified and what kinds of bodies could harbor an autonomous, sovereign self. Debates about wet nursing, breastfeeding, and household chores turned on whether female bodies were capable of alienable labor, and whether the unchosen porosity of the female body threatened the ideal of self-ownership required for both the commodification of work and the institution of popular sovereignty alike. Regimes of political equality, self-governance, and self-reliance envisioned men as autonomous subjects defined by ownership of the body as a discrete and sovereign space. The feminized tasks of breastfeeding, housecleaning, and wet-nursing posited, by contrast, a view of the body as a space defined by radical interdependence and porosity vis à vis other organisms, from children to microbes.