State feminism informed economic planning as seen in Tunisia’s participation in the global population movement. Tunisian legislation regarding marriage and divorce encouraged the restructuring of kin loyalties along a nuclear model, while the legalization of contraception and restrictions of family allocations encouraged small families. Tunisia domesticated the worldwide consensus stigmatizing high fertility as common among poor, rural, or racially inferior communities while using language about women’s health to gloss over coercive policies, with the UNFT and women’s press situating birth control within modern womanhood and maternal health. Working alongside foreign personnel, Tunisian doctors and administrators wrestled with the implications of racial logics and their applicability to local realities, whether medical, logistical or otherwise, often targeting rural women. The implementation of family planning resulted from a process of negotiation between men and women in the field. Rural communities refused to isolate childbearing from the social and economic contexts that informed their decisions about family life. Women’s insistence on the intersection of class and regional identities in their understanding of gender roles and family life rejected state efforts to locate modern womanhood outside family and community and challenged the limits of state control over their bodies.