Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, British, French and Italian colonial and mandatory powers imposed a system of regulated prostitution, which included licensing of prostitutes and brothels and strict medical and police supervision. This system often encountered local resistance, and in some cases, such as Palestine, it was abolished shortly after World War I. In others, it outlasted colonial rule. Historiographies of regulation often focus on local resistance, and the imposed nature of regulation. The proposed paper focuses on the Egyptian case and demonstrates that local resistance was far from unanimous. In fact, it was hotly debated within the Egyptian medical community. First, regulation was still considered to be a safe measure against venereal disease. Pro-regulation doctors recognized its flaws, but insisted that it could be improved. Abolitionists, on their part, argued that since most prostitutes evaded inspection anyway, abolition would terminate the shame of state-authorized vice. Second, regulationists and abolitionists debated the danger to the public once prostitutes left licensed brothels. Here the question of what led women to prostitution, and whether their rehabilitation was ever possible was central. Third, medical doctors discussed sex education and its ability to deter young men from frequenting prostitutes. Here the sexuality of unmarried men took central stage. Focusing on medical debates on prostitution, then, the proposed lecture will examine the role of doctors in interwar Egypt in molding public policy, as well as their understanding of sexuality, individual bodies and the national body as a whole.

This paper, based on original research in the archives of the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn (MI), the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva and the archives of the French state, takes as its point of departure famine relief parcels sent to Syria-Lebanon by the Union of Syrian Ladies in Alexandria, Egypt during World War One. The paper argues that the wartime humanitarian activities of Syro-Lebanese women’s groups in the diaspora proved constitutive of a durable mode of gendered philanthropic politics, connecting the global Syro-Lebanese diaspora and the emerging Mandate states of Syria and Lebanon during the 1920s. The paper thus provides a counterpoint and a global framework to the panel’s other contributors, who focus more closely on the movement of women within the Eastern Mediterranean. It also draws on and contributes to the current debates on the history of humanitarian intervention and human rights discourse, as reinvigorated recently by Samuel Moyn, Lynn Hunt and Didier Fassin (Fassin 2012; Moyn 2010; Hunt 2007). Within the historiography of the French Mandate, the paper recasts Elizabeth Thompson’s decade-old argument - about a ‘maternalist’ Mandate regime in Syria-Lebanon during the 1920s – to take account of new scholarship on the Syro-Lebanese diaspora by Akram Khater, Andrew Arsan and others (Thompson 2000; Arsan 2011; Khater 2001). The paper thus tests the concept of a ‘maternalist’ Mandate diaspora in comparative perspective. By examining the activities of Syro-Lebanese women’s philanthropic associations in diaspora communities both inside the Eastern Mediterranean and in North America, and by contrasting these associations’ humanitarian philanthropy during World War One with a subsequent iteration of such practices during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925-6, the paper identifies the geographic and diachronic shifts in Syro-Lebanese diaspora women’s humanitarian philanthropy – both targeted at women in particular and not. Thus, the paper contributes to this panel by emphasizing not only the movement of women within the borders of the ‘mandate Mediterranean’ but ‘women’s movements’ – especially philanthropic and humanitarian associations – that existed well beyond the region while remaining focused on it. In closing, the paper assesses the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission, and the inter-relationship between diaspora Syro-Lebanese women’s movements and the gendered humanitarian norms established and diffused by the League regarding the migration and labor of women in Mandate contexts.

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.

The French mandate over Lebanon and Syria linked these former Ottoman Arab provinces to other territories under French tutelage, including North African colonies and protectorates. While some of the ensuing mobilities, such as the arrival of colonial troops, resulted from French administrative strategy, unregulated circulations- whether of Arabs traveling to the Americas, Bedouin disregarding mandate borders, or Jewish migrants into the region were regarded as destabilizing to a fragile mandate governance. Women´s movement in particular aggravated authorities’ disquiet regarding what the archive labels the policing of morals. Women circulated in mandate Lebanon and Syria according to overlapping logics, increasingly finding work in service positions which ran the gamut from the café chantant to hat confectioners, secretaries in the colonial bureaucracy or state employed madames recruited in Morocco. Whether as providers of Western crafts and commodities in the urban modern materializing in Eastern Mediterranean ports or as prostitutes engaged in state engineered servicing of troops stationed in rural outposts, working women sparked local hostility on the part of conservative and religious sectors who increasingly identified the category of ‘françaises’ with prostitution and depravity. In order to dissociate moral scandal from colonial women, French authorities severely restricted the arrival of women, while instituting close surveillance of dancers and other itinerant performers constantly suspected of being spies, and of Arab women employed in the prostitution industry servicing the colonial garrisons in the Bekaa and smuggled into the British mandate of Palestine to flesh out the flesh trade in the thriving industrial port of Haifa. This paper is based on original archive research at the Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres archives in Nantes and Paris, the City Archive of Haifa, and numerous interviews.