This paper aims at shedding light on a specific story of feminized migration poorly known outside its local point of departure, the Gori?ka borderland, at the Slovenian border with Italy, and women's final destination, Egypt, specifically Alexandria- hence the name they were designated with "Alexandrinke"- and Cairo. From the second half of the 19th century, in particular after the opening of Suez Canal in 1869, to the 1960's, thousands of rural women migrated to booming Egypt to work as wet-nurses, nannies and governesses for rich expat or local bourgeois families. This migratory wave stands out as peculiar within the general history of gendered migration in Italy. As opposed to other areas of the country, especially the South ( Sicily, Campania, Calabria, etc.) where women were sorted by employment agencies often linked with criminal organizations, migration from the Gori?ka region was structured along family ties. In many cases, two or three generations of women belonging to the same family embarked the steamers from Trieste towards Alexandria where they could rely on co-villagers' networks. Coming from former Habsburg domains, they were literate and remarkably well educated compared to housemaids of different origins and they satisfied a high and specialized segment of the job market. Remarkably, during the 1st World, Alexandrinkes' remittances were absolutely fundamental in sustaining their families' shattered household economies back to their villages. These stories are not always ones of self-realization and success, though. As it emerges from meticulous sifting of archival sources from the Italian National Archives and the Archives of the Association for the Preservation of the Aleksandrikes' Cultural Heritage, Prvacina, Slovenia, some women ended up in the "White Slave Trade", a reality that now-a-day quite simplistic narrations of fulfilment and proletarian emancipation tend to conceal, contrarily to coeval stories of victimization and exploitation. This papers aims at demonstrating how these women, far from being metaphors of shared bourgeois anxieties or post-modern subaltern improvement, actively tried to transform their economic and social roles in response to global economic change and attempted at shaping their agency, despite their conditions of social, economic and cultural subordination.