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Women Wanderers: The Syrian American Elite and Sexual Normativity
Abstract
While many Syrian immigrant women provided crucial economic support to their families and communities through their work as peddlers, the pages of the Syrian American press show great consternation about women’s mobility and peddling labor. Imagined as unsupervised and morally corruptible, Syrian women peddlers threatened the idealized Syrian American identity that elite Syrian immigrants were crafting in the context of Syrian and American discourses of race, modernity, citizenship, and gendered and sexual propriety. By reiterating several arguments about the dangers of peddling to women, to the Syrian community, and to the community’s reputation, writers claimed a link between peddling and an aberrant female sexuality. Debates about women peddlers in the Syrian American press index concerns about the parameters of normative Syrian sexuality as refracted through white and middle-class American ideals regarding women.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
North America
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries