The role of women in Iran has commonly been viewed solely through the lens of religion, symbolized by veiled females subordinated by society. In this work, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, an Iranian-American historian, aims to explain how the role of women has been central to national political debates in Iran. Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the book examines issues impacting women's lives under successive regimes, including hygiene campaigns that cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; conflicts between religion and secularism; the politics of dress; and government policies on contraception and population control. Among the topics she will examine are the development of a women's movement in Iran, perhaps most publicly expressed by Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. The narrative comes up to the present, looking at reproductive rights, the spread of AIDS, and fashion since the Iranian Revolution. -- Publisher description.

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.

After Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Castro government sought to instill a new social order. Hoping to achieve a new and egalitarian society, the state invested in policies designed to promote the well-being of women and children. Yet once the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economic troubles worsened, these programs began to collapse, with serious results for Cuban families. Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state. Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.

"There has been as yet very little written about educated women who are aligned with the Islamic Republic of Iran and part of the inner circle of the state. This book takes an entirely new approach to these women and works to disrupt stereotypes that portray them as mouthpieces of the regime by untangling the minutiae of their daily lives and connecting it to their aspirations." - Rose Wellman, author of Feeding Iran: Shi`i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic "[Tawasil]'s discussion of veiling and staying out of sight is the most complex, comprehensive, insightful, grounded treatment l have ever seen. Her understanding of the howzevi women's perspectives of the meaning of their veiling, of their purposes, their goals for their religious selves is outstanding. ... We do not have anything like this-a study of the world of female religious students and teachers, as women striving to become the religious selves they want to attain." - Mary Hegland, author of Days of Revolution: Political Unrest in an Iranian Village What can women's scholastic pursuits tell us about what building an Islamic state looks like for women who are loyal to its project? And what can an ethnographic study of women who are using Islamic education to transform their conditions in Iran teach us about our own humanity? Paths Made by Walking provides insight into these questions by examining how Iranian women have participated in Islamic education after the 1979 Revolution. The first ethnography on Iranian howzevi (seminarian) women, it reveals how ideologies of womanhood, institutions, and Islamic practices have played a pivotal role in religiously conservative women's mobility in the Middle East. Based on several months of participant-observation, Paths Made by Walking presents an ethnography of the seminarian women whose Islamic education has propelled some of them into powerful positions in Iran, from close ties with the state's Supreme Leader and Chief Justice to membership in the Basij (voluntary military organization). At the same time, these women often choose to remain "hidden" or to otherwise follow practices that seem inscrutable or illogical from a framework of politicized resistance. By centering the howzevi women's senses of self and revealing their complex interpretations of their beliefs, Amina Tawasil offers a fresh perspective on forms of feminine identity that do not always mirror supposedly universal desires for recognition, autonomy, leadership, or authority. Taking readers into the classrooms, living rooms, and compounds where howzevi women participate in intellectual discourse, this book invites readers to reconsider their conceptualizations of the women who support the Islamic Republic of Iran"--

As governments around the world grapple with the challenge of delivering environmental sustainability, attention has recently focused on the role that citizens should play in meeting the challenge. In advanced industrial countries such as ours, which operate in the political framework of liberal capitalism, what relevance can we place on 'environmental citizenship'? This book looks at the obstacles and opportunities which exist within this context and examines the possibility of ethical investment, the social economy and considers whether there is space in the capitalist economy for environmental citizens to 'do the right thing?' This book is a special issue of the leading journal Environmental Politics.

Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls "nostalgic modernism," which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics. Lovett looks closely at the ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic "fitter families" campaign, George Maxwell's "homecroft" movement of land reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation and country life, and Edward Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control. Demonstrating the historical circumstances that linked agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism, Lovett shows how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive. In addition to contributing to scholarship in American history, gender studies, rural studies, and environmental history, Lovett's study sheds light on the rhetoric of "family values" that has regained currency in recent years.

The family-state relationship in contemporary American theory and public policy -- Theorizing the supportive state -- The supportive state and caretaker-dependent ("vertical") relationships -- The supportive state and ("horizontal") relationships among adults -- The supportive state, family privacy, and children.