Susanna Ferguson, Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Susanna Ferguson (SF): I wrote this book for three interrelated reasons. First, I wanted to explore what we could learn about the history of Arab thought if we looked beyond canonical texts by major male intellectuals to work written and edited by women, which often appeared in the more ephemeral periodical press. While women’s intellectual work in Arabic has been carefully analyzed for how it addresses questions of women and gender, that literature felt largely separate from the history of Arab thought, which has not only focused overwhelmingly on male figures, but often analyzed central questions—about sovereignty, liberalism, capitalism, and colonialism, for example—without reference to gender, sex, or reproduction. Domains outside of gender and the “woman question,” in other words, seemed to be considered men’s business by default: women wrote about women, and men wrote about everything else. In the book, I argue that this separation between “malestream” Arab intellectual history (to use Marilyn Booth’s excellent term) on the one hand, and histories of women and gender, on the other, has prevented us from seeing how central gender and sex have been to many domains of modern social thought where the “woman question” does not explicitly appear. What I learned from reading Arab women’s writing, in other words, was how much apparently masculine questions about civilization and society; labor and work; nationalism and anti-colonialism; and democracy and popular sovereignty were absolutely, fundamentally entangled with questions of gender, sex, and reproduction.

The second reason I wrote the book was that I wanted to take Arab thinkers, particularly women, seriously—not only as objects of historical study but as theoretical interlocutors in their own right. That is, I wanted to read Arab writers not only for what they revealed about their own places and times, but also as part of a broader trajectory of shared intellectual engagement with central questions of modern life that have not yet been resolved. These included questions about how to think about change over time; how to forge a society or social order; and how to institute and maintain popular sovereignty and democratic governance. These questions have resonated—and still do!—both within and beyond the Arabic-speaking world. The idea, in other words, was to think about writers like Labiba Hashim and Julia Dimashqiyya not only alongside Taha Husayn or Rashid Rida, but also alongside Karl Marx or Nancy Fraser. In the book, I try to think about this approach as “theory from the Arab East.”

With all of this in mind, I turned to the Arabic women’s press of Beirut and Cairo between the 1880s and 1930s to ask what the history of modern Arab thought might look like from that perspective. What I realized through reading those journals was that discussions of childrearing and upbringing, or tarbiya in Arabic, were a huge preoccupation—more so, in some cases, than the questions of women’s rights, education, and feminist politics that other historians had highlighted. Across religion, geography, and political orientation, women’s journals devoted an enormous amount of space to questions about how to raise a child. This was the third, most straightforward reason I wrote the book: to try to figure out why this was the case. Why did the Arabic women’s press pay so much attention to how to raise a child? What could these debates about childrearing reveal about how writers working in Arabic understood and tried to shape the changes they were living through? Those are the fundamental questions the book sets out to answer.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

SF: The book is a feminist conceptual history of tarbiya, or childrearing, in the Arabic press between the 1850s and 1939. It focuses on journals and magazines edited by women in Beirut and Cairo, but also reflects the ways that they engaged male contemporaries. As I mentioned above, it argues that the history of women, gender, and the “woman question” is central to Arab intellectual history more broadly. 

Love’s Labor also addresses several additional conversations. The first is the history of temporality, modernity, and progress—which is part of the colonial history of the discipline of history itself. While we have good accounts of how European and Ottoman empires invested in linear temporalities of civilization, modernization, and development for their own purposes, I approach the question from a different perspective. I explore how Arab writers turned to childhood and adolescence to theorize multiple frameworks of change over time, from the linear project of step-by-step childrearing advice to precocity, delay, and a kind of rebirth offered by (male) sexual maturity. Overall, the book shows how discussions of tarbiya brought gender, sex, and reproduction to the heart of attempts to manage and rethink linear, developmental time from an Ottoman periphery increasingly colonized by Europeans.

Second, the book turns to feminist questions about gender, sex, and reproduction to provide a new angle of vision on the history of capitalist society in and beyond the Arab region. It does so by tracing a history of social reproduction as it was theorized in Arabic. As theorists of tarbiya powerfully argued, we cannot understand capital accumulation without thinking about feminized social reproduction. We also cannot grasp how people experienced the rise of wage labor without understanding how domains of “women’s work” like breastfeeding and childcare became limit cases for what kinds of work could be bought and sold. Writers in the Arab world made these arguments precisely as they lived through, and tried to shape, the broad social transformations that came with the region’s incorporation into a world economy and the uneven rise of capitalist societies.

The third conversation Love’s Labor addresses is the history of popular sovereignty and democratic governance in and beyond the colonial context. Partha Chatterjee once famously suggested that domains of women and gender became so important in the colony because these domains represented an “inner domain” of sovereignty for colonized men. Through Arabic-language debates about tarbiya, I offer a different kind of explanation, one that stretches beyond the colonized context—as discussions of childrearing did, too. I read discussions of tarbiya, and its analogs in other languages, as revealing a key connection between histories of capitalism and liberalism, showing how women, sex, and reproduction tie the two together. Discussions of tarbiya linked social reproduction—the work of making workers’ bodies—to what I call political reproduction, the work of making citizens who could responsibly govern themselves. Tarbiya made this link by assigning both social and political reproduction to women. The modern category of “woman,” then, was forged as much by the emergence of gendered forms of ethical and political labor as by science, religion, and law. As the interdependence essential to both political and social reproduction became marked as women’s work, it became possible to sweep that interdependence under the rug—that is, to posit a new kind of state and society driven by adult men’s autonomous choices, as voters and as workers. Assigning social and political reproduction to women, in turn, is what made possible the fantasy of the “self-owning” (male) subject that undergirds both modern democracies and capitalist societies, where adult men are assumed to choose their votes as well as how to allocate their labor. This is one reason, I think, that binary, heteronormative gender regimes have been so essential to modern capitalist, democratic regimes in and beyond the colonial context, and thus have proved so devilishly difficult to discard. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SF: I am excited and grateful to see anyone engaging with the book! I hope that work might find readers among historians of the Middle East as well as those interested in histories of capitalism, labor, gender, sexuality, and popular sovereignty. For those who teach courses on the history of the modern Middle East, I hope Love’s Labor can offer ways to introduce questions of gender and sex (as well as some of the Arab region’s formidable women writers) to major thematic discussions, for example around development/modernization, global capitalist integration, and the rise of liberal politics and popular sovereignty as a political ideal. I also tried to write the book in a way that could speak to scholars working on gender, temporality, capitalism, and popular sovereignty in other contexts, particularly since I benefitted so much from reading work outside my own regional subfield. I hope scholars working on non-Arab contexts might consider not only the comparative potential of the Eastern Mediterranean as a space where writers turned to gender and sex to respond to interlinked problems of coloniality, capitalism, and democracy, but also what the Arabic speakers I engage in the book have to offer as theoretical interlocutors, whose ideas can resonate and travel beyond their original conditions of articulation. To be more specific, I wonder: what would a history of tarbiya look like in Japan, Mexico, or the United States?

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SF: My new research is about the history of plant knowledge in Greater Syria or Bilad al-Sham between the 1850s and the 1930s. I came to the project because I began to see plant knowledge and botanical writing as one domain where Arabic speakers grappled with questions about sexuality and reproduction. But I soon realized that plants also shaped how Arabic speakers, both rural and urban, thought about property, territory, body, land, and belonging or nativeness. Looking at how people thought about plants, then, shows how key domains in modern Arab thought and social life have a more-than-human history, and one where sex is also central even when it does not explicitly appear.

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 4 to 7)

The women and men who lived in Cairo and Beirut between 1850 and 1939 turned to tarbiya to address three central challenges that defined their age. First was the emergence of capitalist society and the rise of a powerful middle class of bureaucrats and intellectuals who dreamed of limited, gradual reform while struggling to maintain existing hierarchies based on class, age, and gender. Second was the emergence of movements seeking to replace an older politics of sultanic authority and hierarchical interdependence with popular sovereignty and representative democracy, a project complicated by the ongoing advances of European empires. Third was the slow and incomplete suppression of the trade in enslaved people and the rise of a heterosexual, nuclear family ideal that redistributed domestic work in elite and middle-class households in unprecedented ways. Writers in the Arab East identified the feminized work of childrearing—that is, the work of childrearing assigned to women—as a way to guide and control these transformations. As they debated what it meant to bear and raise a child, writers tasked women with a doubled form of labor: they tied social reproduction, or the reproduction of labor under capitalism, to political reproduction, or the reproduction of citizens for self-rule.

Labors of Love tells the story of women’s reproductive work and modern social thought through a history of the concept of tarbiya, an Arabic word for the general cultivation of living things that came, over the course of the nineteenth century, to refer primarily to women’s childrearing labor in the home. Between the 1850s and the 1930s, upbringing (tarbiya) and formal education (taʿlīm) became central subjects of concern among literate people in the Arab East. Missionaries, Ottoman statesmen, and members of the region’s own elite and middle classes entered into fierce competition over the domain of education. Eager to poach one another’s students, they read each other’s books and journals and founded schools side by side. They were especially interested in educating girls as “mothers of the future,” practitioners of tarbiyawho could advance particular agendas by instilling proper principles in young children in the home. This attitude of competition led to substantial cross-pollination. Across sect, gender, and geography, writers debated how to feed a newborn, whether to swaddle, and how to inspire obedience and respect. What constituted good tarbiya, they wondered, and what could it accomplish? Together, they turned to tarbiya to face a challenge that has troubled modern societies around the globe: how to reproduce bodies for labor, citizens for self-government, and subjects for a social order capable of both stability and progress. In so doing, they turned women’s childrearing work into a form of world-making that did not require power over the pedagogical or disciplinary apparatus of the state.

If the communities of readers and writers who argued about how to raise a child between 1850 and 1939 were diverse in terms of geography, sect, and political belonging, they generally occupied similar social positions. Most theorists of tarbiya enjoyed relative privilege and cultural authority, because they had the education, time, and resources to participate in the world of publication. Publishing and education were essential to forging a new class of intellectuals, a culturally powerful subset of an emerging middle class, distinct from the landed elites and rural cultivators who had dominated the region’s population until the nineteenth century. Incorporation into a global capitalist economy from mid-century onward pushed many off their land while also bringing new opportunities for urban professional employment. These new pathways enabled the rise of a new middle class. Tarbiya, in turn, came to express a bourgeois sensibility: it spoke to concerns about progress, sex, and social order that became dear to middle-class women and men across a multiconfessional religious landscape. Ideas about upbringing made their way into law, public policy, school curricula, and libraries, shaping the gendered boundaries of modern political life. But concepts like tarbiya should not be read only as vehicles for expressing particular class interests. This book argues that tarbiya also captured and responded to essential political questions presented by the era’s historical transitions. Its theorists had a great deal to say about the changes they wrought and witnessed. This history of their concept is my attempt to listen.

The argument of this study takes shape on two levels. On one level, it is a conceptual history of tarbiya in Arabic thought and letters between 1850 and 1939, focusing on the Arabic women’s press. It asks why people talked and wrote so much about how to raise a child, and how their ideas about childrearing and motherhood shaped how they thought about politics, society, gender, and colonialism, and vice versa. As such, the book argues that both women writers and questions of gender and sex have been central to the development of Arab intellectual and political life beyond the confines of well-known debates about the status and rights of women. Specifically, it shows how a broad faith in middle-class women’s power as childrearers enabled Islamists, liberals, and feminists alike to contend with three questions that defined intellectual life: how to imagine futures after imperial rule, how to balance the promises of democratic politics with the interests of reformist elites, and how to stabilize existing social hierarchies under the shifting conditions of colonial capitalism. In other words, the story of tarbiya lays out some of the central contradictions of democracy and capitalism as they were encountered in Cairo and Beirut.

On another level, the book attempts to think with the concept of tarbiya to analyze the broader questions of social and political reproduction that challenged Arab intellectuals and many others at the turn of the twentieth century, and that continue to challenge us today. It shows how writers, both men and women, turned to childrearing to understand and shape the changes happening around them. These writers insisted that reproduction was not a “hidden abode” but a central domain of world-making and therefore of political contestation. This domain has gone unexplored by scholars who have seen political theory as something done by men in the public sphere. But theorists of tarbiya, many of whom were women, made a key contribution to understanding politics and social life by tying together two domains usually kept separate. The first was social reproduction, the task of raising children and keeping adults fed, clothed, and socialized to be healthy and productive members of a laboring society. The second was political reproduction, the task of creating moral, governable, and trustworthy subjects for representative self-government. By positioning both of these domains as women’s work, writers feminized a contradiction essential to capitalist society and liberal political regimes: dependence on nominally free and self-owning adult actors who have, in fact, already been shaped outside of the formal spaces of politics and economic exchange. In other words, tarbiya turned the contradictory task of shaping subjects to be free and self-owning into women’s work.

Theorist Nancy Fraser has argued that capitalism depends on “background conditions of possibility,” notably the reproduction, often assigned to women, of the people whose work sustains wage labor and capital accumulation. The story of tarbiya illustrates that democracy has also relied on such background conditions: it presumes citizens who have already been shaped to make them trustworthy enough to administer the state. In the Arabic-speaking world, as in many places, that work has also been assigned to women in the home. The story of tarbiya shows, then, that the long-standing focus on motherhood in Arab thought not only sidelined women from formal political life. It also asserted the centrality of women’s childrearing to the formation of political and laboring subjects, and thus to addressing the broader challenges of democracy, capitalism, and popular sovereignty in the modern world.

As the twentieth century wore on, feminist movements in the Arab region and around the world would turn their attention to women’s waged work and political and legal equality. Earlier visions, however, have had multiple afterlives. While the world changed in ways that theorists of motherhood and domesticity did not foresee, their ideas continue to shape what it means to work, to participate in politics, and to live together. By highlighting the importance of tarbiya, writers insisted on both feminizing and emphasizing the question of political and social reproduction. Their focus on women’s sweat, foreheads, and hearts, and on the embodied labor of mothering and childrearing, offers a new angle of vision on histories of women, gender, and feminism, as well as of Arab intellectual life. More broadly, their work offers new ways to think about the emancipatory promises and drastic limits of capitalist social relations and representative self-government in the Arabic-speaking world and beyond.