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Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran. By F i r o o z e h k A s h A n i - s A B e t . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 306. $29.95 (paper).
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet's Conceiving Citizens, a recipient of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award for 2012, is a welcome contribu- tion to Middle East gender and sexuality studies and provides rich potential for comparative studies in other fields. The author embarks on an ambitious undertaking examining the topics of hygiene, marriage, sexuality, and re- production in Iran from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary Islamic Republic. The comprehensive nature of the study is matched by a rigorous methodology and analysis of sources ranging from Iranian trea- tises on hygiene to European and American accounts to visual images from Persian-language periodicals (reproduced in the book). Kashani-Sabet marshals copious evidence to argue that the modern women's movement in Iran was shaped by the discourses on science and sexuality dominant among maternalists in medical and policy-making circles. Maternalists, she contends, "did not all wish to establish gender equality or to combat patriarchy . . . [but instead] advanced the state's political ideology" (5). In the process of unraveling the tensions between maternalism and feminism in twentieth- century Iran, she delves into well-trodden themes in the field, such as sci- entific domesticity and veiling/unveiling, as well as underexplored subjects, such as sexually transmitted disease, midwifery, and women's suffrage.
The book's ten chapters are organized into...