Amin located political modernization in reforming motherhood through girls’ education

Evidence

Education must be given to girls, he said, to enable them as mothers to offer scientific answers to the eternal questioning of their children. As he argued repeatedly in his subsequent writings, the process of creating a modern political order was to begin on the mother’s knee. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 364

Categorization

• CANDY: The claim that building a modern state ‘was to begin on the mother’s knee’ is a vivid, tweetable irony — modern scientific rationality founded on a domestic image.