This paper explains the interwar transformations in Algerian women’s labor and the anxiety and debate it provoked in the press. As increasing numbers of families moved from rural Algeria to Algeria’s largely European urban centers in the interwar period, women’s labor also shifted. Previously women’s labor was either agricultural or artisanal labor within the home, such as carpet weaving, lace making, or embroidery. In the interwar period, however, thousands of Algerian women in urban centers were newly employed as domestic servants in European homes. Women moved through the city in new ways, regularly traversing the boundaries between Algerian and European neighborhoods. This mobility transformed not only family dynamics, but also institutions of interwar Algerian public life. This increased mobility, visibility, and engagement provoked sex panic within both the French- and Arabic-language press. Every detail of women’s movement and comportment carried new meaning—including how her body moved through space, her choice of makeup, and whether she stopped to talk to shopkeepers or passersby. Men expressed their sexual anxiety by drawing allusions between the women they newly observed in public and public women, or prostitutes. Working women’s visibility and mobility, they argued, mirrored the sexual and moral indecency of prostitutes. Many questioned whether these developments signaled the beginning of the Algerian man’s demise, as he would be emasculated not only by women’s new earning power but by her potential sexual indecency. The intimate connections between women’s labor in the settler economy and these discourses of sexual danger reflected men’s economic anxiety in the face of women’s increased visibility, mobility, and earning power. This paper will draw from a range of archives, including the French- and Arabic-language Algerian press, state archives from Algeria, and print sources including interwar dissertations.