In 1965, the Egyptian government launched a national family planning program in order to slow the national birth rate. Although the program was ostensibly national in scope, government officials, international development agencies, and researchers focused overwhelmingly on rural Egyptians as the culprits behind the country’s high fertility rates. The family planning program had modernizing objectives in addition to its health and development concerns; the program provided a new way for the government to increase its surveillance over the countryside while attempting to persuade the peasantry to adopt middle class norms and material status markers. Yet hegemonic control over the countryside proved elusive: most peasant families refused to regulate their families on the government’s terms, rendering the program a failure in its initial phase. This paper proposes new ways of thinking about peasant resistance and subaltern agency through a historical study of Egypt’s family planning program. The numerous demographic and development reports penned by Egyptian government officials, international development personnel, and independent researchers captured the anxieties that these diverse authors felt about Egypt’s rural populations. These anxieties were often expressed in terms of class, gender, and race. At the same time, these development reports are also a rich source of insights into the actions and attitudes of Egypt’s subaltern populations. In both the narratives and statistical tables of these family planning surveys, it is possible to discover how rural men and women responded to the government’s population policies, and the motives that guided their responses. From this collection of primary sources I argue that the vast majority of rural Egyptians engaged in a “resistance of persistence” against the government’s family planning. This mode of resistance differed from the “hidden transcripts” described by James C. Scott in that rural Egyptians’ defiance toward the national family planning program was typically open, honest, and non-violent, and it did not take place in the context of severe oppression or domination. Persistence in old behaviors has not usually been considered a form of resistance by most historians or social scientists, and yet viewing it as such reveals new dynamics that can exist between the state and subaltern populations. In the case of Egypt’s family planning program, rural Egyptians were able to maintain significant control over their reproductive decisions in spite of an expensive nationwide campaign to decrease Egypt’s birth rate. This paper contributes new insights about subaltern agency, peasant resistance, and the myth of state hegemony.