Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet's book Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran is an engagingly written, often enlightening contribution to an already rich body of work on the history of gender in Iran. Spanning the Qajar era to the Islamic Republic, this book aims to unravel the complex historical experiences of motherhood in Iran. In order to do so, Kashani-Sabet examines the history of maternalism, which she defines as “an ideology which promoted motherhood, childcare, and maternal well-being not only within the strictures of the family but also in consideration of nationalist concerns” (p. 4). Maternalism as a political discourse, she argues, emerged both as part of wider concerns with improving public health and sanitation, and attempts by reformers to define new social roles for women, and those dual concerns continued to frame how the politics of motherhood play out in modern Iran. The book is divided into three roughly chronological parts: Part 1 looks at how social and intellectual changes in Qajar Iran first brought concerns about hygiene, health, and the reproduction of Iranian mothers to the forefront of the modernist reform agenda. Part 2 deals with institutional change, and how maternalist agendas were taken up in the public arena, particularly the emergence of a public health infrastructure that assumed increasing responsibility for Iranian women's bodies. Finally, Part 3 focuses on the implications of maternalism for feminism and women's roles after 1941, examining changes in women's access to education, professional careers and political participation.

One of Kashani-Sabet's most important conceptual moves is to distinguish between maternalists who, while they strove to improve women's health, did not aim to combat patriarchy or achieve gender equality, and feminists who, while they may have pursued some maternalist agendas and shared some assumptions about the primacy of motherhood, used the openings offered by maternalist discourses to push for gains for women in education, employment, and other arenas. What gives the book its narrative coherence and drive is this push and pull between feminist, statist, and various reformist forces to define what motherhood would mean for millions of Iranian women. Ultimately, she argues that feminism and maternalism in Iran have had a complicated relationship—while maternalism allowed women to make new social and political claims on the nation and take up new public roles, it just as often constrained them by continuing to define Iranian women in terms of their reproductive capacities.

The breadth of sources she brings to bear on her analysis of Iranian conceptions of female health and sexuality is a notable strength of Kashani-Sabet's book. Using everything from early treatises on health to state archival material to European travel writing allows her to trace maternalism across a wide range of institutional and discursive contexts—the public education system, the popular press, an emerging public health infrastructure, the women's movement, and the writings of religious scholars. These sources lead Kashani-Sabet to forge interesting linkages between seemingly disparate facts, such as the concern of public health officials over the prevalence of syphilis and the importation of female cosmetics into Iran in the 1930s or Mohammed Reza Shah's divorce of his first wife, Queen Farida, and the implementation of a national family-planning program in the 1960s.

An especially fascinating part of earlier chapters is Kashani-Sabet's discussion of the ways in which maternalists conceptualized childhood disability. Discussions of deformity and Iranian concerns around it are featured in several chapters and draw productively on the latest research in disability studies, a field with which scholars of the Middle East have only recently started to engage. She implies that concerns around the fitness of children and the alarm over birth defects and deformities was something new, a product of emerging concerns with maternal health, but research on the Ottoman context suggests there is a prehistory here. It would have been interesting to see a discussion of how disability was viewed and treated in earlier periods.

If there is a lacuna in Kashani-Sabet's work it is her lack of substantive engagement with work on maternalism in other Middle Eastern contexts. This is curious because her work shows an impressive command of the secondary sources on the history of women's health, medicine, and maternalism in Europe. In fact, she is skillful in drawing comparisons between Iran and Europe to tease out where Iran diverged from European cases and where it did not. She writes in her introduction that Middle Eastern scholars have been slow to explore the salience of maternalism and hygiene. While this is accurate for much of the Middle East and North Africa, it does not bear out in the case of Egypt for which there is a rich and substantive body of work dealing at least in part with maternalism and its centrality to nationalist debates including Lisa Pollard's Nurturing the Nation (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005), Omina Shakry's work on social reformers’ debates around birth control and rural reform in the 1930s and 1940s, and Hibba Abugeidieri's book Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2010) on the history of gynecology and midwifery in Egypt (although it is quite possible that Abugeidieri's work, which was published in 2010, came out too late for Kashani-Sabet to engage with it). None of these works are listed in Kashani-Sabet's bibliography although she does list a few others, including works by Beth Baron and Khalid Fahmy. This seems a missed opportunity for comparison. Nonetheless, the book stands on its own as an important and substantive work on the history of gender, feminism, and the history of public health in Iran.