The interwar years were a period of profound transition for Algerian society. As the European settler class, backed by the French colonial regime, continued to confiscate Algeria’s best agricultural land, economic opportunity waned for rural Algerians and many migrated en masse to Algeria’s urban centers. Desperate to support their families, women joined the labor force as domestic servants within European homes. Against this backdrop, debates about women animated Algerian society within the pages of the rapidly expanding Algerian French- and Arabic-language press. New technologies, like wire news, granted new access to political developments across the Middle East. Muslims in Algeria devoted enormous intellectual energy to analyzing how the improved status of women in spaces like Egypt and Turkey led to broader societal uplift. Commentators articulated a path forward for Algeria through aspirations and imaginings of a future Algeria with women at the center of the process. They argued that the feminist advancement of the Middle East was creating an Islamic renaissance in the present—a critical message of hope for his audience in Algeria. This paper explores how and why the emotional, the aspirational, and the imaginary mattered. This analysis of the impact of these transnational references borrows from and contributes to the growing body of work on “emotional transnationalism,” which, according to Diane Wolf, models how to analyze “the process of sustaining transnational connections through emotions.” The pride that Muslims in Algeria articulated in response to Middle Eastern developments was bound up in their own emotional response to the daily humiliations of life in a settler colony and their mounting hopelessness regarding the possibility of reforming colonial policy. In between the lines of calls for a more egalitarian society were dreams of a future in which young Algerian dreams of a modern Muslim society could be realized.