This paper examines changing discourses about gender relations amongst Karaite Jews in Cairo in the 1940s and 50s. Articles from the Arabic-language Karaite newspaper al-Kalim show that the Karaite community were troubled about marriage during this period, a concern which I argue reflects the Karaites’ increasing discomfort over their place within the changing nation, yet simultaneously their profound cultural integration within Egyptian society. As Kholoussy (2010) has shown, discourses about marriage, divorce and bachelorhood were a prime forum in which Egyptians expressed anxieties over the wellbeing of the nation amidst the upheavals of the first three decades of the twentieth century. In the pages of al-Kalim, debates about marriage centred primarily around the dowry (dota) system. Male and female writers alike bemoaned dowry inflation, in some cases claiming that it threatened the community’s very existence, whilst proponents and opponents of reform marshalled economic and social arguments to make their cases. Karaite Jews used these conversations to establish or contest new modes of interaction between the genders, debate changing ideals of wifehood and masculinity, and set out their vision for the future of their community—much as other Egyptian commentators had done in preceding decades. Yet in the Karaite case, I argue, this reflected anxieties specific to their community. If the preceding period had witnessed political and economic uncertainty for all Egyptians, as well as intense upheavals in relations between Jews and non-Jews, the Karaites occupied an especially precarious position. Enjoying limited economic privilege and access to foreign citizenship relative to Rabbanite Jews, they were more vulnerable to the social and bureaucratic hostility that all Jews faced during this period, and were becoming increasingly uncertain of their place within the changing nation. Nevertheless, the vocabulary Karaites used to articulate these anxieties, which they shared with other, non-Jewish, Egyptians, reveals that they consumed and adapted nation-wide discourses regarding cultural and social change. This study of discourses surrounding marriage and gender not only contributes empirically to our historical knowledge of Jewish social life in Egypt, but offers a useful corrective to top-down frameworks which begin by questioning the national, political and cultural affiliations of Middle Eastern Jews rather than allowing the sources to speak for themselves.