At least since the publication of Foucault's seminal work on the creation of the medicalized body, "The Birth of the Clinic," it has been clear to scholars and others that the field of medicine and health more generally is intimately connected with political and social power exchanges in society. Thus, the classification of diseases, their identification, their prevention and cure are not ideologically neutral acts but are in fact part of the way in which medical and scientific knowledge function as power media in the modern world. In many if not all societies, medical knowledge has also been entwined with the creation of a gendered public discourse that is used to control women's bodies while appropriating the idea of womanhood for political aims. In such circumstances, women become either the carriers of colonial modernity in the face of the denial of such modernity by colonizing powers or they are seen as the repositories of traditional knowledge and practices, in which case they are denied the chance for coevalness by their male counterparts in the anti-colonial struggle. Paradoxically, women are sometimes asked to play both roles simultaneously, resulting in conflicting discourses about women's roles in the public sphere and the national body. In this paper, "Women, Health and the National Body in the Iraqi Shi'i Public Sphere, 1935-1939," I explore the nationalist appropriation of women's bodies and social practices in the name of public hygiene in the discourse of Shi'i Iraqi intellectuals between 1935 and 1939, and the ways in which this discourse created a set of contradictory expectations for Shi'i women in interwar-era Iraq. The paper is structured around a series of newspaper articles from the 1930s published in al-Hatif, a Shi'i journal from Iraq, that articulate the links between the female body, women's domestic and social practices and the health of the Iraqi nation and of its Shi'i citizens.