This paper evaluates the writings of Rifa`a al-Tahtawi, Ali Mubarak, Muhammad Abduh and Qasim Amin on marriage and the family. These men have been occasionally mis-identified anachronistically as calling for women’s “emancipation.” Rather, they were concerned with the well-being of the conjugal family, which they believed to be the basic unit in society. Demographically, the conjugal family is the equivalent of the simple or nuclear family. In nineteenth-century Europe, and especially in France, it was mistakenly thought to be both a cause and an artifact of modernity. A conjugal family is by definition monogamous, the couple having a companionate relationship. The advent of the modern conjugal family ideal is also associated with a stricter division between public and private or domestic spheres, and the restriction of women to the latter as homemakers and mothers. A sound family life was deemed essential to advancing the nation, since the family was the place where children, the nation’s future, were formed. The idea that, properly educated, women would be better homemakers and mothers had become widely accepted in France by the middle of the century. France, as is well known, was to a much greater extent than any other country the model for Ottoman and Egyptian reform. The four men whose ideas are examined were readers of French, and while some of them traveled to other European countries their exposure to European social discourse was through the medium of French, and consisted largely of French discourse. In writing about the family they were selective in the ideas they adopted and in the Egyptian/Islamic practices they defended. Yet clearly they promoted the conjugal family ideal by advocating such reforms as women’s education, limits on divorce and the practice of monogamy, which they believed would strengthen the family and advance the nation. Nineteenth-century “familism,” not feminism, generated these and other reformist ideas that nowadays are regarded as having advanced the status of women, and which were embraced by the twentieth-century feminist movement.

This paper begins with a discussion of the economic centrality of the family among the ruling elite in Ottoman Tunisia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arguing that the familial is political. Through a structural and materialist analysis of the family as a social institution and economic unit, I situate Tunisia within a broader Ottoman context and argue for the significance of family history for comparative studies. In contrast to nationalist arguments that Tunisia was already an autonomous or independent state during the Ottoman period, the symbolics of rule illustrate the importance of references to the Sultan, manifestations of the position of the provincial governor within an Ottoman hierarchy, and the resonance of imperial motifs of legitimacy through charities, pious foundations, and the distribution of justice. I argue that the provincial governors – the beys of Tunis - were able to maintain and secure their authority in part through a myriad of charitable contributions which created numerous opportunities for interaction with the subject population. These often presumed hierarchical conceptions of the father’s position within the family, upon whom the population as children was to depend. Relying on these forms of benevolent patriarchy, the governors extended their role as fathers of the ruling families and the palace households, to express paternal concern for their subjects. With the onset of French colonial rule in 1881, the ruling family was stripped of its economic base and prevented from continuing to support welfare projects as the colonial government sought to associate the family with the private sphere. Within the ‘protectorate’ system of colonial rule, the French government began a new and republican approach to occupation as a form of tutelage which inscribed paternal care onto colonial officials and civilizational immaturity onto their colonized subjects. Yet the governor himself was scripted into an intermediary role, the details of which were elaborated in the first decade of colonial rule, where his continued performance of power was necessary to justify of French occupation.

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.

In 1936, the Mandatory Unveiling Act forced urban Iranian women to remove their veils in public; in 1937, the Marriage Law was enacted; and in 1940, a penal law that sanctioned the murder of wife, mother, or sister caught in circumstances of adultery or leading up to adultery was passed by the Assembly. Abruptly, traditional divisions between public and private were struck down, the public sphere heterosocialized, and relations of desire codified. In the midst of these bracing reforms, S?deq Hed?yat published his novel B?f-e K?r (The Blind Owl, 1937). The Blind Owl, commonly considered the fountainhead of Persian literary modernity, relates a distorted love story in two parts: the culmination of the first is the violent dismemberment of the narrator’s silent beloved; in the second part, this beloved is reconstituted as the narrator’s garrulous (and adulterous) wife, only to be murdered once more at the novel’s conclusion. Yet, in spite of the gruesome allegory of misplaced desire the novel offers (and the telling coincidence of its publication date), The Blind Owl is rarely read within the context of the specific gender-sited legal reforms instituted at the moment of the novel’s publication. I argue that The Blind Owl, read in tandem with a second canonical novel of the period, Bozorg ‘Alav?’s Cheshmh?yash (Her Eyes, 1952), displays an important but overlooked preoccupation with gender-related reforms of the Reza Shah period and the consequences these reforms had on existing orientations and representations of desire. The seemingly oppositional acts that both novels attend to—dismemberment and reconstitution (or re-memberment) of the female beloveds in the novels—are not only the structuring principles of the novels but of the larger process of re-making women that was underway during the reign of Reza Shah.

The Iraqi education system under the monarchy (1921-1958) is often seen as aiming primarily to unite Iraqis across their differences in order to produce a new generation of loyal national citizens. But while public schooling in this period did aim to submerge certain kinds of difference, especially those related to religious sect, it also worked to produce, intensify or redefine other kinds of difference, such as those marked by divisions of urban/rural, Arab/Kurd and male/female. My paper examines the increasing differentiation of Iraqi public education on the basis of sex from the 1930s to 1958. It also explores the interplay between gender and other kinds of difference central to the discourses and practices of national education in the twentieth century, including family/nation, public/private, adult/child, literate/ignorant, modern/backwards and developed/underdeveloped. In the years leading up to and following World War II, a new generation of Iraqi educators, supported by international development experts working in Iraq, pushed for the re-orientation of public education around the needs of national economic development. Part of this re-orientation was an emerging criticism that the Iraqi public school curriculum was not sufficiently differentiated by sex and thus did not train future mothers in skills necessary for successful development. These educators recommended that female students from the primary through the college levels be required to take courses in home economics, a field developed in the United States during the late nineteenth century. The recommendations were implemented through revisions to curricula, textbooks, teacher training programs and paths of education. In what might seem to be a paradox, the differentiation of the curriculum by sex was paralleled by the expansion of coeducation in Iraq at the primary and postsecondary levels during this same time period. An Iraqi girl entering the public education system in 1926 was certain to study in a school populated only by other girls, but she was almost equally certain to study the same material and follow the same course of schooling as a boy at her grade level. A girl entering the system in 1956 might or might not attend a coeducational primary school, but either way she would follow a girls-only curriculum for perhaps 20% of the time she spent in that school. It seemed that the more girls mixed with boys, and women with men, in the public sphere, the greater became the impetus to produce differences in their learned modes of being and thinking.