This paper examines the construction and deployment of ideas of idealized Turkish motherhood and notions of the “modern” family in Turkey during the 1930s. During this period, women were commonly portrayed as central to the civilizing and modernizing process and to the strength of the Turkish nation-state. Questions about the status of women within the family and society, women’s appropriate roles in public and domestic life, and, most urgently for political leaders and social experts, how to promote rapid population growth dominated public and political discourses. I trace the entwining of motherhood and nationalism in this era through an examination of pubic discourses, legislation, and social policies introduced by the state to reduce infant and child mortality rates and encourage women and men to have large families. I draw upon a variety of Turkish newspapers, memoirs, and archival sources to underscore the politicization of women as “reproducers” of the nation, as well as to illustrate some latent contradictions in nationalist campaigns to foster population growth and “modernize” mothering practices. The paper illustrates how national ideals of modernity were expressed through discourses on women’s roles within society and in the family, pointing to fissures in class constructions of ideal womanhood and mothering practices. National rhetoric underscored the need for properly educated, professional women capable of raising well-disciplined children, on the one hand, and lauded the virtues of hard-working rural women, who toiled with their hands even as they cared for their infants on their backs, on the other. Yet both urban educated, professional women and rural working women were also objects of censure. Women who “failed” in motherhood were stereotyped variously as idle, vain “society” women, as career women refusing motherhood because it may have prevented achieving professional goals, or as poor urban or rural women, whose fatalistic, “traditional” worldview impeded assuring the welfare of their children. Each stereotype represented a figure to be rehabilitated into a secular, national vision of modern Turkish womanhood, where motherhood marked the apex of a woman’s contribution to family, society, and state. This research reveals the extent to which women were seen as pivotal actors in the creation of the Turkish nation-state through their reproductive and mothering capacities, while also tracing new forms of governmental regulation of family life and resistances to them.