Conceiving Citizens places women and their role as mothers of the nation as central to the history of Iran during successive regimes in the 19th and 20th centuries.

While Iranian women have most frequently been viewed through the politics of veiling, Conceiving Citizens interprets modern Iranian politics and society through the history of women's health and sexuality. Drawing on archival documents and manuscript sources from Iran and elsewhere, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet illustrates how debates over hygiene, reproductive politics, and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explained demographic trends and put women at the center of nationalist debates. Exploring women's lives under successive regimes, she chronicles the hygiene campaigns that cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; government policies on contraception and population control; and tensions between religion and secularism.

Conceiving citizens is to be welcomed as a contribution to a better understanding of how both modern medicine and nationalist concern impacted on women's education, employment, civil and political rights ... The book is well documented, well written, and though it will be of significant interest to specialists in Iranian women's history, it is also recommendable to scholars of modern and contemporary Iranian society and to students of gender and sexuality in the Middle East.