This article examines how Colombian doctors and public health officials during the last decades of the nineteenth century produced a body of knowledge about the health of the nation's citizens, using the language and authority of science to speak about a society in need of redemption and medical intervention. In these cases, gender became an essential component of elite and medical discourses. Medical doctors and hygienists described female identities either as potentially threatening and therefore degenerative to the nation's moral and economic fabric or as a 'civilizing force' through the mobilization of motherhood and the reification of the Colombian family as a regenerative site. The doctors and government officials here examined expected women to preserve the family as a unit and inculcate the values of order, hygiene and efficiency in the private sphere. If elite constructions of 'ideal' female identities mobilized women in their primary function as mothers, preoccupations with the control of 'public women' that upset public order or threatened the family unit rhetorically emphasized their deviance. In direct contrast to the feminine ideal, the construction of the feminine other emphasized moral transgression and sexual promiscuity.