This paper deals with gender and sexuality as intimate aspects of the social transformation associated with the spread of modern industry and in Egypt. The conflict between rising national capitalists and foreign domination during the interwar period spawned the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in al-Mahalla al-Kubra in 1927 as the largest domestically owned textile enterprise in Egypt. This development set in motion unsettling transformations in the town's socio-economic life. Among these were the immigration into the town of thousands of male and female peasants hired to work in the mill, rapid urbanization and population growth, and a host of new social and economic tensions between the urban population and the peasant workers. As a part of a larger project on social transformation into urban industrial life, this paper traces the phenomenal increase of harassment of women, child molestation, prostitution and the public exposure of private homosexual relationships in the town. Encountering public prostitution for the first time in their lives, some newcomers contracted venereal diseases. In workers' slums, up to two dozen adults and children shared tiny rooms. At work, child laborers were at the mercy of their older colleagues and supervisors. These conditions made many of them vulnerable to sexual abuse at work and home. The situation was not much better for female workers. Driven away from their villages and families, many women workers lived in the town or commuted daily in public transportation with strange men. In both cases they faced harassment and the stigma of being "sexually loose". Utilizing archival research and oral history, I argue that the coercive industrial organization and hierarchy in which thousands of men and women both adults and children were concentrated at work and at home under the power of unfamiliar men intensified sexual harassment to a phenomenal level. Rapid urbanization and social transformation stripped away the traditional structures of society and new norms had not yet been reconstructed. The state interfered and selectively criminalized particular sexual practices both among male workers and between workers and women of the town. This exposed private intimacy to public scrutiny and judgment and fed public discourse on morality, public health and the conditions of the working class. The paper draws intensively on a variety of archival sources, including Shari'a, criminal and civil court documents in addition to the 'Abdin Royal Court petition files, the archive of the Corporations Department, memoirs and oral history.