This paper focuses on the Mediterranean as a connecting space and follows peoples, particularly women– teachers, health workers, secretaries - as they traversed its multiple shores, their journeys related in one way or another to the opening of the Suez Canal. Their arrival to Port Said from the interwar period to the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 connect and transgress boundaries of cultural areas, be they delimited by academic disciplines or geopolitical concerns. By conceiving of the Mediterranean as a space both literally and metaphorically fluid, this presentation will reconsider the conventional borders of regional anthropology and historical narratives. The histories and journeys of the women this paper examines link the Egyptian, French, and Maltese shores of the Mediterranean. Middle Eastern studies has often obscured fundamental webs of connection like these, and in this paper I seek to bring those connections to light. This presentation attempts not to rethink these locations in isolation, but instead, to delve deeply into their mutual influences by paying particular attention to the mobilities of women that connect them. Why women? Suez Canal studies have often focused on the seemingly grander themes of oil, finance, and global politics; however, this paper wishes to reorient our attention and accommodate women as recognizable actors in the wake of the merging of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. The area where the Suez Canal sits has, since ancient times, been a commercial, intellectual, strategic, sacred, and utterly cosmopolitan place visited by, among others, merchants, artists, smugglers, and missionaries. As I explore the female peopling that emerged with the Suez Canal and the afterlives elsewhere, I follow women who grew up on along the Canal and later moved on to the further shores of the Mediterranean. The paper will draw on extended and long-established contacts among communities who have stayed in Egypt or migrated to France and Malta, incorporating published memoirs, travel accounts, and archival documents. How did canal frontiers and the societies that coalesced along them transform, divert, or stabilize other migratory currents in the Canal Zone and Mediterranean worlds—and beyond? And what narratives do Port Saidians have about the women who once lived in the city but now have moved to the other side of the Mediterranean?