This talk traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought between 1850 and 1939. It shows how writers used ideas about childrearing (tarbiya in Arabic) to address key issues in modern social thought, such as freedom, labor, and democracy. While debates about childrearing in Arabic 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. Highlighting Arab women's writing offers a new way to think about the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the idea of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.