During the early twentieth century, popular magazines and women’s periodicals in Egypt were often a forum where cartoonists and writers expressed a repudiation of Blackness (Powell). Through literary and visual analysis of two different texts from al-Jins al-laṭīf (The Fair Gender) and al-Muṣawwar (The Illustrated) - one emerging during the pre-independence anticolonial era (1913) and another during Egypt’s postcolonial era (1955) - this paper explores the discursive continuities and shifts that marked Blackness with barbarity and the ideal Egyptian woman as civilizable, as long as she was not Black. In 1913, for example, the prominent women’s periodical al-Jins al-laṭīf that played a notable role in advocating for women’s rights in Egypt, published an article entitled “ʿAwāʾid wa-akhlāq: Ḥurriyyat al-marʾa fī bilād al-mutawaḥḥishīn” (“Customs and Traditions: Women’s Liberation in the Lands of the Savages”). Engaging colonial theories of racial science — which maintained that there was no gender differentiation among Black people since they were “primitive” and less “evolved” — and using the notion of female barbarism as my point of departure, I show how Egyptian writers mobilized British colonial anthropological formations to produce their own gendered nationalism that distanced itself from Blackness. Specifically, this paper asks: how did prominent women’s periodicals, like al-Jins al-laṭīf, deploy morality and modesty as analytics of racialization? I argue that throughout the first half of the twentieth century Egyptian print media continuously reproduced racist and colonial notions of cleanliness, purity, honor, and desire to position the civilizable (non-Black) Egyptian woman against “barbaric” dark-skinned Black women. Indeed, as a 1955 article in al-Muṣawwar titled “Dark and Beautiful” demonstrates, such representations outlived even Egyptian independence in 1952. My analysis reveals that women’s periodicals relied on racialized understandings of gender to advocate for Egyptian women’s rights and liberation by placing Black women outside the pale of Egyptian womanhood and assimilating the latter to European womanhood. Finally, I show how legacies of African slavery and colonialism shaped public discourse around race, gender, and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. Citations: Powell, Eve Troutt. A different shade of colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the mastery of the Sudan. University of California Press, 2003.