Childrearing in the Liberal Age: Mothers, Families, and Political Subjectivity in Egypt and Lebanon, 1892–1939

The period 1860-1939 is often referred to as the Arab world’s “Liberal Age.” During this period, European political theory began to circulate unevenly in Egypt and Greater Syria; Ottoman reforms highlighted languages of equal rights and citizenship throughout the Empire; and integration into a global market economy knit the merchants and peasants of Egypt and the Levant into unequal, if increasingly interconnected, networks of capital and trade. As the circulation of people, texts, and commodities between Europe and the Arab world intensified, ideas about freedom, representative governance, and political equality became tied to questions about European military and economic power.

These heady transformations sparked a vigorous debate about family life that turned on the question of what it meant to raise a child. This paper examines this debate in the Arabic press between 1892 and 1939 to show how writers, particularly women, increasingly invoked childrearing within the family as the foundation of modern political life. During this period, local and colonial elites grappled with fears about the power of mass politics and expanded suffrage to disrupt a “social order” built around their hegemony. If (propertied, male) Egyptians and Lebanese were to participate in representative governance without destroying social hierarchies, in other words, these actors would have to be not just born, but made. Women writers in Cairo and Beirut positioned childrearing as a form of political subject formation that could assuage these fears. They envisioned motherhood and family outside the market, commodity consumption, and colonial penetration to argue that childrearing was key to shaping political subjects suitable for both democratic governance and ongoing elite hegemony. In turn, the imagined centrality of family and motherhood to political subject formation in the Arab world’s liberal age shaped family life as well as the political horizons of the women’s movement and the state.