Labors of Love

How to raise a child became a central concern of intellectual debate from Cairo to Beirut over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intimately linked with discussions around capitalism and democracy, considerations about women, gender, and childrearing emerged as essential to modern social theory. Arab writers, particularly women, made sex, the body, and women's ethical labor central to fending off European imperial advances, instituting representative politics, and managing social order.

Labors of Love traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Susanna Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

"Labors of Love offers a fresh and interesting perspective on gender and the rise of the modern Arab world. Susanna Ferguson has told a much neglected story that still permeates the Arab world today, but, as she is at pains to point out, is not unique to the Arab world, rather is part of a global story. While the story is intensely local, it is not a tale of exceptionising or exoticising the Arab world or Arab women; the book is nuanced, detailed well-researched and easy to read."—Usman Butt, Middle East Monitor

"Labors of Love beautifully traces a key concept of the Nahda, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arabic knowledge movement: tarbiya. Signifying child raising and education, the term nurtured discussions about the moral basis of society and brought women thinkers into political engagement. Methodologically sophisticated, and clearly written, this trailblazing book with its focus on gendered formations of discourse and activism reframes critical questions at the intersections of Middle East studies, gender history, post/colonial analysis, and the history of education and childhood."—Marilyn Booth, University of Oxford

"With innovation and bravery, Susanna Ferguson places the theorists of mothering, childrearing, and upbringing in their rightful place, at the center of intellectual and economic thought. Alongside thinkers like Labiba Hashim and Julia Dimashqiyya, she offers new ways of understanding the concepts that constitute the modern era: growth, time, and sexuality."—Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara