Migration and the Colonial Economy

Economic crisis created the conditions for women’s dramatic entry into the labor force in the interwar years. By the end of World War I, the Muslim middle and elite classes were small, with the overwhelming majority of the Muslim population struggling to eke out a living amid shrinking economic opportunities in both the Algerian countryside and cities. The settler economy produced an increasingly large gap between the modern, mechanized settler farms, which often operated on the most fertile land, and small family-run Muslim farms on less desirable land.⁹ As large, European agricultural landholders, backed by the French colonial regime, continued to confiscate Algeria’s best agricultural land, economic opportunity waned for rural Muslims. Muslims suffered famine-like conditions in 1912, 1920, and 1937 in particular, which led many families to abandon rural life altogether and migrate to nearby towns and cities. One noteworthy exception was how in this same period some former peasants bought back land from Europeans. They formed an emergent rural, mid-scale landholding class who would later comprise one of the social bases of the nationalist movement.

These conditions led many Muslims to migrate from rural to urban Algeria in the interwar years. In spite of the Great Depression, French settlers in Algeria fared better than those in the metropole, and European settler families enjoyed some upward mobility. Before the First World War, domestic workers in European homes were most often Spanish settlers.¹⁰ As more Europeans experienced upward mobility, however, there was an increase in the demand for domestic workers as the pool of European domestic labor shrank. While some Muslim men did work as domestic workers, the roles were largely filled by Muslim women, who would accept lower wages and were perceived by Europeans to be less threatening than Muslim men.

The exponential growth in the numbers of women working in the interwar period was also due to the exacerbation of an existing phenomenon: a lack of male income providers. The death, illness, and migration facilitated by World War I left many interwar Muslim families without income earners. Large-scale male migration to France left many married Muslim women widowed or divorced, and unmarried Algerian women unable to depend on their brothers or fathers to support the family, although some of these men sent money home when they could. This outmigration from Algeria to France was legally facilitated by a 1914 law that authorized freedom of movement between Algeria and France for Muslims.¹¹ While scholars have emphasized the flows of migration facilitated by colonialism, including of soldiers and workers between Algeria and France, between 1911 and 1921 two hundred thousand Muslims left Algeria for places other than France, most often the Middle East.¹² The Muslim men who stayed in Algeria struggled to find work. Many were only able to find sporadic employment as day laborers.

Many migrated en masse to Algeria’s urban centers. The urban Muslim population increased from 558,000 in 1926 to 819,500 in 1936.¹³ Between 1926 and 1936, then, Algerian cities were populated with 261,500 recent arrivals from the countryside.¹⁴ This trend continued with the urban Muslim population reaching 1,642,000 by 1954.¹⁵ The informal segregation of colonial life, under which Muslims were often relegated to particular neighborhoods, meant that this urban population was often concentrated in cramped quarters.¹⁶ Algiers’s working-class Muslim population was largely concentrated within the boundaries of the casbah, which was composed predominantly of a series of Ottoman-era constructions, with a small number of European buildings around the perimeter. The casbah was not only marked by its historical architecture but also delineated by very specific cartographical boundaries: the Rampe Vallée, the Guillemin boulevard, and the Militaire du Nord boulevard.¹⁷ While the ancient walls that once marked the limits of the city no longer stood, Muslim inhabitants largely remained within their boundaries.¹⁸ As the population of the casbah grew exponentially throughout the first half of the twentieth century, its limited space became increasingly densely inhabited. Between 1881 and 1931 the population density of the casbah of Algiers more than doubled, from 1,436 to 2,984 inhabitants per square hectare.¹⁹ In 1931 alone, of the 53,517 inhabitants of the casbah of Algiers, 87 percent were recent migrants to the capital city from rural Algeria.²⁰ Many of these recent arrivals struggled economically. Kabyle men mostly worked as day laborers, while their wives worked as domestic workers.²¹ Yet despite continued economic hardship, these recent migrants and working-class men and women of the casbah left their mark on the booming urban culture.

The geography of the casbah also allowed for an alternate sphere of circulation for all Muslim women: rooftops. Women could move through the city in semi-privacy through the rooftops and still avoid the casbah’s crowded streets.²² The rooftops also offered women the space to escape the heat of their apartments, entertain friends, and enjoy the view of the Mediterranean.²³ In the 1937 film Pépé le Moko, shot in Algiers, the protagonist Pépé escapes from the police via rooftops to return to his hiding place. As he moves across the rooftops, veiled women stand and stare, unused to the presence of a man in their otherwise female domain.

While the data about women’s work is often sparse, some statistics offer a few broad strokes of the landscape of women’s work in the early twentieth century. In 1911, for example, women were most often employed within the clothing industry, including sorting secondhand clothes to be resold. Broadly, there was an exponential increase in recorded numbers of Muslim women working in the early twentieth century, from 1,520 in 1902 to 25,821 by 1924. Before the interwar period, the most dominant forms of work for Muslim women were agricultural labor (largely underreported) and work in the clothing industry as seamstresses, weavers, embroiderers, and lace makers.

What is noticeable from these statistics is not only that women’s labor in domestic work increased rapidly between 1911 and 1954 but also that it bore an inverse relationship to men’s employment in domestic work. In other words, between 1911 and 1954 Muslim women replaced Muslim men as domestic workers. Of the total population of Muslim women in 1954, 2,236,950, only 2 percent were employed at all and 1 percent as domestic workers. So the number of domestic workers with respect to the overall population of women remained small but still significant, particularly considering its dramatic increase over the interwar years. Other qualitative sources suggest that women also took up other forms of work, including embroidery, shoemaking, weaving, and cigarette manufacturing, among others, which are not reflected in these statistics. In the Arab world broadly, as Nadia Hijab has argued, despite claims that Arab women do not work, they are often central actors in national economies, although generally in less visible sectors, including agriculture and the domestic economy.²⁴

While many rural women were skilled in artisanal crafts, including spinning wool, weaving, and sometimes pottery, rural and urban women earned more from domestic service. In Algiers, after domestic work, artisanal work completed within the home or in workshops was the second most dominant form of work. In general, there was great diversity in the reported wages for women’s work. One administrative memo claimed that domestic workers in Algiers earned between thirty and forty francs per hour. This figure may have been exaggerated since a range of documents and memos suggest that in other cities, domestic workers made thirty to sixty francs per month.²⁵ In most industrial settings, administrators reported that women were paid between four to ten francs/day depending on their age and skill. The form of most profitable work was not the same across all Algerian cities. Constantine, for example, had a smaller population of European settlers and a larger existing market for gold and silver thread work, so there more women earned income from craftwork than domestic service.²⁶

In colonial Algeria domestic work arrangements were often informal and underreported, so official statistics offer only a partial view. While urbanization was underway across Algeria, the archival record is particularly fruitful for the city of Algiers. In May 1929 the mayor of Algiers counted 1,430 women (980 women and 450 “young women”) who worked as domestic workers in Algiers alone.²⁷ He noted that the hours of employment for domestic workers were “very variable.” This statistic was likely on the lower end of the actual number, considering that other sources suggest the total number of Muslim women domestic workers in Algeria was already at 4,655 in 1911.²⁸

Within the family space, women’s earning power changed how families operated. Marie Baroy, a master’s student, conducted interviews with Muslim families to better understand women’s labor.²⁹ She described the change within the family space provoked by women’s earning power as a “revolution.” Since women who secured domestic work were more likely to bring in regular income than their husbands, women exerted greater control over the family’s budgeting. Men began submitting their entire paychecks to the woman of the household, with the exception of a few francs men might keep for cigarettes. According to Baroy’s interviews, it was the woman of the house who decided whether there was enough extra money for a man to visit the cafés—a key space of male sociability. Since women maintained more regular hours, men were more often primarily responsible for taking care of the children while she was at work. Finally, before and during the interwar period, it was often the men who would complete any shopping for the home, including groceries. Baroy reported, however, that many of the casbah women she interviewed completed the shopping for the home themselves, further expanding the visibility and mobility their employment already granted them. While it is difficult to determine how representative Baroy’s interviews were, they speak to what was newly possible for some Muslim women because of their new income from domestic work.

Women’s work transformed not only family life but the optics and dynamics of urban life as well. As rural populations flocked to nearby cities in the early twentieth century, they brought with them their own norms and attitudes about gender. The status of women in rural Algeria varied widely, dependent on the particularities of their region and sometimes their tribal affiliation. Rural women may have covered their hair, but they often did not don the haik with its face veil more common in Algerian cities. Some tribes, including the Ouled Nail and their neighboring tribes in the South and the Azriyat in the Eastern Aures Mountains, allowed remarkable sexual freedom for women.³⁰ In rural Algerian villages, women and girls contributed to the economic life of the family, through picking fruits and vegetables and preserving them, pressing olives into oil, and weaving carpets and other textiles. Indeed, across North Africa, as Julia Clancy-Smith has written, women have always “played a significant role in the service sectors of the region’s economies, acting as religious agents, healers, marriage brokers, midwives, laundresses, cooks, prostitutes, servants, musicians, and entertainers—in addition to toiling long and hard as agriculturalists, pastoralists, and traders.”³¹

However, as rural populations migrated to Algerian cities, they came into closer proximity with not only European settlers but also urban Muslims, for whom women’s participation in public life was rarer. Algeria was not unique in the different attitudes about women’s presence in public life between rural and urban populations. Judith Tucker has shown that in Egypt and Palestine too, lower-class women enjoyed less sequestration, more mobility, and more decision-making power with regard to their marriage and property.³² In Algeria these regional class tensions intersected with the particularities of the colonial economy and the pressure it placed on Muslim men and women. These rural women’s migration to Algeria’s cities and their daily movements through urban space embodied the social upheaval caused by the colonial economy. The discussions that ensued illustrate that the woman question was also, inextricably, a class question.

Working Women on the Move

Domestic workers were not the only Muslim women who were mobile in the interwar years. Some rural women, for example, would travel to small towns to sell jewelry, clothes, home goods, and artisanal goods. Yet domestic workers were a noteworthy group, both because of their scale and because most of them lived and worked in Algeria’s urban centers, where previously women were less visible and mobile. Employment in domestic service drastically transformed women’s “constellations of mobility,” to borrow Tim Cresswell’s term, in ways that changed the optics of Algerian urban space.³³ Both Muslims and settlers wrote about the “processions of veiled women” who left the casbah every morning to work in European neighborhoods.³⁴ It was not only in the streets that one more often saw Muslim women. One Muslim man complained that “now women are everywhere: factories, stores, and administration.”³⁵

Domestic workers were exceptionally mobile Muslim women. They not only left their homes but moved from Muslim neighborhoods into European neighborhoods. In his study of how color lines operated in multiple colonial spaces, Carl Nightingale argues that the maintenance of colonial power required “keeping color lines semiporous … by authorizing very specific forms of urban boundary-crossing,” including domestic workers. He asserts that certain social actors like domestic workers could cross color lines without disrupting the fundamental power relations between colonizer and colonized. He continues, “Gendered interests matter too: white people, typically men, always have tacit permission to cross color lines in search of sex.”³⁶ In interwar Algeria too, while domestic workers’ mobility did not disrupt power dynamics between European settlers and Muslims, it reflected an important reversal of earlier patterns of gendered movement.

While their work enabled mobility between their homes and their places of work, some domestic workers also took on greater public roles. The public lives of two domestic workers in particular, the aforementioned Rahma Ben Drahou and her contemporary Melika Douifi, although not representative, offer more details about what was newly possible in the interwar years for some domestic workers. Rahma Ben Drahou was the daughter of the local sheikh and teacher at a Qur’anic school in a village just outside of Nemours.³⁹ Since she was seven years old, Ben Drahou had worked as a domestic worker for multiple families in Nemours, and her income helped support her entire family. This suggests that even though the pay for domestic work was often meager, it could still bring some material stability to families. Oran républicain published a letter from a Muslim woman (“B.”) who wrote to the publication to share Ben Drahou’s story. She reported that Ben Drahou “enjoyed great popularity” in the town of Nemours for her activism and suggested that Ben Drahou could serve as a model of Muslim women’s emancipation. While her story may have been exceptional, her activism and popularity demonstrate that despite their absences in the archival record, domestic workers were not marginal or invisible actors in interwar public life.

As domestic workers crossed into European neighborhoods and intimate spaces in the interwar years, they broke older patterns of gendered movement where the only figures authorized to cross color lines were European men in search of sex.³⁷ From the start of the French colonial experiment in Algeria in 1830, the casbah was where European men would come to purchase sex from Muslim women. For many settlers, the entire casbah was coded as a space of licentious possibility. As one settler wrote in 1939, “For the Algerois [the settler population of Algiers], the popular expression ‘going to the Casbah’ means to debase oneself [through the purchase of sex].” Domestic workers’ regular daily movement across these neighborhood bounds then broke long-standing patterns of who was authorized to move where in Algeria’s cities. Many of them were permanent migrants. An administrator noted that women who left rural areas to work as domestic workers in Algiers and Berrouaghia (a town 100 km south of Algiers) rarely returned to their families.³⁸

Melika Douifi was a domestic worker who also acted on stage as part of the Alif-Ba theater troupe.⁴⁰ She had moved from Blida to work as a domestic worker in Algiers. Of the six actors in the troupe, some worked for the French colonial regime as interpreters or in the Tribune de Commerce courts, and others were unemployed. Among them, Douifi was the only woman. The troupe performed classic French theater pieces in Arabic. A colonial surveillance report noted that in April 1941, Douifi would be on stage performing in one of the city’s largest venues. In celebration of the Mawlid holiday, which celebrates the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, the troupe would perform Chateaubriand’s The Last of the Abencerrajes either at the Algiers Opera House or the Majestic Theater.

Douifi’s presence on stage as a woman was exceptional. Muslim women performed as singers or dancers in private gatherings such as weddings, but in many of Algeria’s bigger Muslim theater troupes, the parts of women were played either by Egyptian actresses or by men. Marie Soussan, a Jewish singer and actress who was the most important female performer of the interwar years, was a notable exception.⁴¹ Scholars had long thought Soussan was the only non-European woman of her time to appear on stage, but they have now identified at least three Muslim women who also appeared on stage in the 1930s. Still, although she only appears briefly in a surveillance report about Muslim theater, the life of Melika Douifi, recent migrant, domestic worker, and theater performer, modeled newly possible transformations. Although she was a new arrival in Algiers, her unlikely presence as a domestic worker on stage in Algiers’s biggest venues illustrates how women like her left their mark on the city despite their gender and class position.

Both Ben Drahou and Douifi were not only highly mobile women—moving from city to city—but also particularly comfortable in public. Ben Drahou engaged in public activism, while Douifi was willing to act on stage—the only woman in an otherwise all-male acting troupe and one of the few Muslim Algerian women on stage at all in the interwar years. While all domestic workers likely did not share Ben Drahou’s and Douifi’s independence and confidence, they remained objects of inquiry for a broad range of commentators preoccupied with Muslim women’s bodies. Commentators were concerned with not just how such women moved (out of their homes, into European neighborhoods and homes) but also how they dressed (unveiled, wearing makeup). Onto these bodies, each group asserted their own vision of Muslim society’s evolution or descent.

En Route to Assimilation

In May 1929 the mayor of Algiers reported to the prefect of the Department of Algiers that the “indigenous female workforce” was growing “rather rapidly.”⁴² In Algiers alone this workforce had now reached 5,460 women and girls. He noted that of this number, 3,510 (or 64 percent) worked outside the home, the vast majority as domestic workers in European homes. The mayor interpreted these figures as a victory for the project of assimilating Muslims to French culture.

European officials such as the mayor presumed that, if given a chance, Muslim women would model themselves on European women. The growing number of women working, from this perspective, reflected, according to the mayor, “a real progression in the evolution toward the assimilation to European customs.” For the mayor, women’s movement outside of the home indicated this “progression.” For others in the French colonial administration, proximity to Europeans was the factor that would transform the Muslim domestic worker. An administrator from the town of Ksar Boukhari wrote that through domestic service, Muslim women “familiarized themselves with our way of life,” which in turn “quickly transformed their manners and personal customs.”⁴³ What prevented the assimilation process from becoming even more “accentuated,” the mayor wrote, was “Muslim husbands [who] forbid their wives and daughters from going to work outside [the home].” In other words, according to the mayor, this uptick in women working outside the home was an important step toward assimilation and progress, but the project of assimilation still clearly had ground to cover, given the intractability of women’s sequestration.

Muslim writers marveled that, despite the dramatic evidence offered by the sight of domestics en route to work every morning, Europeans clung to their stereotypes about women’s sequestration. One author, al-Gharbi, suggested that Muslim women’s sequestration was an “illusion.”⁴⁴ With “a little more attention,” he wrote, Europeans would certainly notice working Muslim women moving through the city, traversing neighborhood boundaries daily. He asked, “Don’t you see every day, in Algiers without going too far, all the poor Muslim women … going early in the morning to work, where they are employed in certain factories, or as cleaning ladies, washers, sweepers of stairs and hallways in European homes … [or] servants at the homes of European men?” Al-Gharbi’s description emphasized the unmistakable visual spectacle of masses of Muslim women traversing neighborhood boundaries to work in European neighborhoods. Working-class Muslim women’s movement was regular, predictable, and clear evidence, according to al-Gharbi, that Muslim women were not strictly sequestered. Instead, al-Gharbi wrote that those interested in the Muslim woman’s emancipation needed to shift their focus from her supposed sequestration and veiling to the larger questions of political rights and education, because those alone could elevate Muslim women and society.

Yet the focus on sequestration, like that of the veil, persisted. Like the mayor of Algiers, Mussot read Ben Drahou’s story as evidence of the transformative possibility of domestic service. Alongside the letter and Mussot’s commentary, the newspaper published a picture of Ben Drahou unveiled but wearing a beret. For Mussot, Ben Drahou’s unveiled body was another marker of her emancipation.⁴⁵ On one hand, Mussot introduced her column on Ben Drahou with a mention of how little the French colonial state and settler society had done for “the emancipation of the Muslim woman.” Yet her analysis returned to stagnant Muslim customs like sequestration and veiling as the most central impediments to women’s advancement.⁴⁶ Like the mayor’s commentary, Mussot’s suggests that stereotypes about Muslim women did not lose their explanatory power, even as they were complicated by the realities of domestic workers’ mobility.

Featured alongside the column was an illustration (figure 2.2), signed by Mussot, and its caption, presented without commentary or elaboration. The image depicts a veiled Muslim woman with only a single eye uncovered in the Mzabi Ibadite style to represent the past, an unveiled woman in makeup to represent the present, and a woman with popular, flapper-style hair, makeup, and jewelry to represent the future. The caption reads, “The past is no longer. The present has already passed. Only the future is ours.” The image and caption present the fashionable, European young woman as the model of emancipation for Muslim women. The unveiled Muslim domestic worker like Ben Drahou, then, was a step toward assimilation. Here the Muslim woman’s body and its modes of comportment were something to be conquered by French society in order to be able to claim ownership over a future Algeria that would be under French domination culturally.

Some Muslims also celebrated working women’s mobility and the increased public presence of women broadly. The pro-assimilation editor of La Voix Indigène, Rabah Zenati, wrote in 1932 that “the modern young Muslim woman no longer accepts” sequestration.⁴⁷ For Mussot and colonial administrators, Muslim women’s visibility was not a negotiation of customs but rather a consequence of the French colonial project to assimilate Muslims. Yet sequestration in Zenati’s estimation was not a static Muslim custom or something unwaveringly enforced by Muslim men but rather something that Muslim women were empowered enough to negotiate or shrug off. He remarked that one could regularly now observe “some young girls, veiled and not alone of course … in the stores going shopping, taking a walk in the sun which they love, and going to the cinema and even the theater.” Zenati celebrated women’s new, active presence in public life. His note that young women engaged in these activities in groups suggests that women adopted strategies, such as being in public in groups, to avoid presumptions of impropriety and harassment.

Social Upheaval and the Woman Question at the Intersection of Class and Gender

The Muslim press featured a wide range of opinions on working women’s mobility and the increased public presence of women broadly. Unlike Zenati, some were alarmed. Commentators panicked about how women’s greater public presence changed urban space. As they debated whether women should be able to go to the mosque alone at night, for example, commentators recoded urban space into appropriate and inappropriate spaces for women.⁴⁸ Some emphasized sexual danger and framed the question of women’s mobility as a public safety concern.⁴⁹

Concerns about women’s movement were not limited to where women were going and why, however. Commentators pored over the details of how women moved. They questioned whether colorful fabrics, perfume, and noisy jewelry were appropriate. Every aspect of a Muslim woman’s comportment, including the degree to which she was covered, the ornamentation on her clothes, her style of walking, her scent, or the noise her body made when walking, could render her public presence inappropriate. In such discussions, the concern was not women’s safety but rather their naturally cunning and deceitful nature, which required strict control from men. In this climate of urban danger and unrestrained women, some commentators urged men to take on a disciplinary role with the women in their lives, limit women’s mobility, and reassert their own power. They suggested the greater women’s access to public life, the greater the risk of sexual impropriety and moral damage to both man and wife.

Some of these commentaries used pieces of Islamic knowledge to urge men to take on a disciplinary role with the women in their lives and frame masculine control as a religious obligation. In al-Najah, Sheikh Yahya bin Muhammad al-Darraji wrote that the risk of sexual impropriety was so high “in our current time” that men should not allow the women in their lives to visit the mosque alone at night.⁵⁰ He described the potential sexual impropriety as the “risk of fitna” (a trial). This alluded to a larger canon of conservative religious interpretations that described women themselves as fitna, for being temptresses who create disaster for the men they seduce, a concept which feminist sociologist Fatima Mernissi has mapped.⁵¹ He then turned to a hadith that stated God would curse both the woman who left her house in perfume and makeup with the intention of attracting men and her husband. He also cited another hadith stating that women were the most potentially “harmful” test from God. These references to hadith functioned to remind men it was their Islamic duty to control their wives’ mobility and comportment, since their own standing with God was at stake. His emphasis on how such actions were necessary in “our current time” illustrates that such commentaries were not simply timeless critiques of women’s mobility but rather specific critiques rooted in the particularities of women’s increased mobility and visibility in the interwar moment.

In contrast to the lack of sources on domestic workers’ lives, a plethora of published sources feature Muslim men’s anxiety about working women and their mobility. At first glance, many of these responses conform to the broader model of conservative backlash in the interwar years. As women across the world participated in public life in unprecedented ways, men’s complaints illustrated simultaneous misogynist desires to curtail women’s freedom, as well as a wariness of modernity writ large and how it would disrupt power dynamics. A closer look at the commentaries of three authors in particular—Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi, an anonymous writer, and Ali bin Ahmad bin Muhammad al-Namri—illustrate more complex local critiques at play.

Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi, the co-owner of al-Najah, the largest Muslim newspaper in Algeria, warned in 1927 that a “catastrophe” had taken place.⁵² The recent entry of thousands of women into the labor force as domestic workers had changed Algeria’s public spaces. One could regularly observe “servant girls walking in the road[s].” It wasn’t just these women’s movement that troubled him but how they moved. These women walked with their “faces uncovered, flirting with storekeepers, and talking with passersby for no reason.” To El-Hachemi, the bodies of this new class of Muslim women domestic workers and their movement represented everything that urbanization enabled: assimilation to European norms, sexual impropriety, and potential frivolity.

Class tensions help explain his concerns. As Muslim commentators—many of them members of the small Muslim elite—disparaged the mobility of working women in Algerian cities, many of them also contested the imposition of these women’s working-class, migrant norms onto urban public life. El-Hachemi closed his lament about domestics flirting in the street with, “I am sorry that giving this [article] to women servants will not work because they cannot read and they are not in our world, they are in a different world.” He set up a contrast between “our world,” shared by his largely elite male readership, and the “different world” of domestic workers. This “different world” was made possible by urbanization and blurred lines between middle- and working-class Muslims, as well as European and Muslim women. His disgust for these working-class women was palpable.

Like other interwar Muslim commentators, El-Hachemi took issue with domestic workers wearing makeup. He wrote that Muslim women were “absolutely not ready to wear makeup.” He set up a contrast between worldly and sophisticated European women on one hand and Muslim women on the other, who had “never been to an office or seen a store.” The “office” or “store” here functioned as sites of elite and European sociability. While certain Muslims, like elite Muslim men, may have been permitted entry into some such spaces, Muslim women clearly did not belong. Since El-Hachemi’s account stressed the “catastrophic” nature of the present moment, there was also a contrast implicitly established with an earlier, less salacious time. Then, urban Muslim women respected the lines that divided elite and non-elite society, whereas now Muslim women self-fashioned in ways that, according to him, betrayed a desire to appear more European or more sophisticated.

Alongside these concerns about class, writers identified women’s comportment outside the home as a marker of the honor of all of Muslim society, not just a family affair. When El-Hachemi chastised “servant girls” for their makeup, he wrote that they needed to “go back to [their] homes” because they “have dirtied the honor of Muslims with this shame.” The home was thus coded as a space of safety and protection, while it was these women’s comportment in public that polluted communal honor. El-Hachemi framed his commentary as a response to women’s mobility, but what his hysteria revealed was how women were transforming urban space.

For the author, likely El-Hachemi or the paper’s editor, Smaïl Mami, of an unsigned 1926 editorial in al-Najah titled “The Danger of Women,” the issue was the growing threat of female control. He wrote that because of “civilization … now women are everywhere: factories, stores, and administration.”⁵³ The critique of modern, urban life is evident from his connection between “civilization” and women’s greater public presence. The inversion of traditional gender dynamics threatened male domination. The author lamented that since women had assumed these new positions in labor, “she is trying to be better than him and trying to … control him as he controlled her before.” This author suggested women’s goal was the total domination of men, including within the realms of government and labor. He wrote that if men were not careful, all of “commerce will be in the hands of women in twenty years.” All of this concern over economic control reflected anxiety about the economic vulnerability of Muslim men within the colonial economy. While women were able to secure steady, regular employment as domestic workers, urban men were often limited to sporadic forms of work, as day laborers, for example.

The unsigned author of “The Danger of Women” closed his editorial with a set of commandments for men: “Women should do the housework, and make the food and clothing. She should be taught [only] religious material and she should not mix with strangers. And she should be kept away from politics and poetry.” This author’s inclusion of heterosocial interaction also suggests a concern with the danger of women’s public presence. His reminder about housework functioned to reinscribe domestic duties onto women’s increasingly visible and mobile bodies. Like El-Hachemi’s call for women to “go back to [their] homes,” this author similarly closed his account with an attempt to reinscribe domestic duties onto urban women’s newly mobile bodies.

Elite Muslim men like this author saw themselves under siege—by a colonial economy that denied many men the opportunity to work, by calls for assimilation that stressed their cultural and religious inferiority, and by their potentially deceptive wives. While elsewhere sex was alluded to, when it came to the threat posed by Muslim women’s labor, commentators were willing to talk openly. In between the lines of conservative responses to women’s entry into the labor force was a critique of how urbanization had led to the erosion of multiple boundaries—between Europeans and Muslims, between public and private space, and between men and women. As they sought to reinscribe women’s subordinate status onto them, male commentators also sought to reclaim patriarchy as a source of Muslim society’s strength—a rebuttal of French colonial claims that it was the root of their inferiority.

The final article that illustrates these tensions appeared in the anti-French, anti-reformist newspaper al-Balagh al-Jazairi. While its focus was on educated women, its concern with the effect of women’s advancement on Muslim society reveals the sexual concerns that undergirded commentaries about women’s mobility. Ali bin Ahmad bin Muhammad al-Namri affirmed that any education beyond what was necessary for basic literacy, religious education, and domestic training would lead to promiscuity.⁵⁴ He wrote that the educated woman would “play, have fun, and caress whoever she wants, whenever she wants.” The “whoever” and “whenever” here emphasized the erosion of boundaries that previously constrained women. His depiction of a sexually promiscuous wife was intended to remind men that the education of their daughters or wives could lead not only to deviousness but also to emasculation. Women’s inherently promiscuous nature, al-Namri argued, would be exacerbated by the increased opportunities education offered her. His language stressed the need for men to retain strict control over women’s possibilities and to limit women’s access to education and mobility.

Women’s unhinged promiscuity became a metaphor for al-Namri to critique “modern civilization,” which imposed and facilitated the education of women. He described modernity’s potentially devastating effects for Muslim men. He wrote, “Thanks to modern civilization, he [the husband] has lost his dignity and honor … [and] has become a slave to her desires… . Is there any Arab among us who would not be jealous to see his wife pulled in close by another man?” He contrasted natural Arab dignity and jealousy with “modern civilization.” “Modern civilization” then would only further enable women’s inherent promiscuity, rendering Arab men cuckolded, emasculated, and powerless. Women’s education was the doorway to men’s loss of control over the sexual integrity of their households. In al-Namri’s estimation, Arab culture and modern civilization were incompatible. He posited masculine control as an important facet of an Arab man’s very Arabness. He wrote that “modern civilization” would make men “a slave to [women’s] desires.” A woman’s potential control over her husband was an even bigger concern than promiscuity. His article can also be read as a response to not only women’s expanded visibility and mobility but also their new access to decision-making power within families, which compromised male control. Inherent in this discourse of sexual danger and impropriety was a critique not only of working and educated women but also of urbanization and modernity.

Within these commentaries, Europe served as a powerful anti-model where women’s education and entry into the labor force had violated the ideals of femininity. Al-Namri wrote, “The intelligent of [the Westerners] say that we now have a female doctor and a female engineer and a female lawyer, but when will we have a female woman?” Women’s entry into the labor force, he argued, compromised women’s essential womanhood. The reformist poet Mohamed Saleh Ramdane similarly stated that it was important that both men and women “not exceed their limits” by going “against their nature” and moving outside of their designated realms of gendered labor.⁵⁵ If social developments violated natural limits on men and women’s functions, he wrote, the result would be “a masculine woman or a feminine man.”

These articles critiqued gender relations in Europe and reveal anxiety about Muslim women becoming more like “Western” women. Al-Namri wrote that in the West one could see not only a woman’s “equality to man but even her superiority in some matters.”⁵⁶ He wrote that the men of the West clearly “believe they were mistaken and wish they could take the woman back [in terms of progress] so she would respect her limits.” In a letter to the editor published in L’Entente franco-musulmane, a reader wrote that those who called for Muslim women’s advancement should not forget “the question of the too-free woman,” whom one could see on display in France.⁵⁷ Women’s excessive liberty, he wrote, was the cause of “the complex problems of declining birth rate, of unemployment, of the physical and moral health of individuals and the nation.”

These critiques of France leveled by al-Namri and others inverted colonial attacks on Muslim patriarchy.⁵⁸ They argued that Muslim society’s adherence to essentialist patriarchy was the source not of its inferiority but its superiority. By permitting European women to enter the labor force and maintain public positions, European men had upended the basic principles of patriarchy and thus destabilized European society. The signs of this destabilization were precisely the pronatalist concerns that captivated both metropolitan and settler French publics in the interwar years, including the declining French birth rate.⁵⁹

Other commentators also used news from Europe to legitimize similar concerns. One article in al-Najah, likely written by El-Hachemi or Mami, reported on a recently discovered “evil” gang of violent women thieves in London.⁶⁰ The article reported with horror that the women had “huge bodies” and “strong arms,” which they used alongside guns and knives. The article likely referring to the Forty Elephants, an all-female crime syndicate in existence in London from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century who were particularly powerful in the interwar period.⁶¹ The article’s critique was rooted in not only these women’s violation of gender norms but the entire society’s violation of normative gender labor. It stated plainly that “thievery is not a job for the gentler sex.” Moreover, the article argued the British government paved the way for this female gang when they allowed women to join the police force, a form of labor that should be “just for men.” These women, with their abnormally masculine bodies, embodied an entire society in chaos because of violations to the normative gender labor supposedly intended by nature. The article implied that Muslims in Algeria too needed to be careful not to encourage such violations to normative gender labor because “we do not want to see theft or thievery gangs happen.” Women should “do no job in the world but managing the house,” the article stated, to ensure the peaceful stability of the society as a whole. Such implicit threats illustrate how interwar commentators envisioned their society as on the precipice because of women’s changing mobility, visibility, and labor. Algerian society could, according to such concerned commentators, either limit women’s labor to the home or allow women to complete more diverse forms of labor, advance in the way of Europe, and suffer chaos.

News from the Middle East also offered commentators material for lamenting how societies changed as a result of women’s changing labor. One 1924 article in al-Najah lamented that since urban women joined the workforce in larger numbers in Turkey, they began also frequenting heterosocial places, like “bars and clubs.”⁶² Village women, on the other hand, merited praise according to the author because they worked alongside men completing agricultural work, but they did “not go with him to the café in the evening.” Inherent in this comparison was a critique of the kinds of gender upheaval modern urban life facilitated. Cafés played a particularly important role within Algerian society.⁶³ Typically an exclusively masculine space, cafés fostered community social and intellectual exchange. Women’s potential entry into this space, then, represented more than just movement into a masculine space. It also signified entry into Muslim public life.

Sometimes such claims that mobile women could create societal chaos were encapsulated in brief maxims, published without commentary. A set of sayings published in the reformist al-Shihab stated, “The women and the microbe should stay isolated from people to prevent their damage and their evil. The more you give them freedom, the more they create damage and create evil.”⁶⁴ The link to women’s greater independence was clear: the greater women’s access to public life, the greater the risk of sexual impropriety and moral damage to both man and wife.

The Safety and Shame of Domestic Work

Other commentators in the Muslim press also questioned whether domestic service was safe for Muslim women. On a rhetorical level, many authors referred to domestic workers in ways that evoked sympathy for the humiliation of their work. In La Défense al-Gharbi referred to the domestics in the streets every morning with sympathy as “poor Muslim women.” Abdelhafidh ben El-Hachemi wrote that the term “service … talks to the heart and melts it.”⁶⁵ An author, Sayyid ʿAbd al-Qadir bin Si Ahmad, wrote in to al-Bassair from Aïn Beïda to complain that something needed to be done about “our ignorant girls … working as maids and servants for people who do not respect their religion or their purity.”⁶⁶ In her letter to La Défense, a woman who signed her letter “Séti B. M.” complained that so many “poor girls are working at the age of fourteen or earlier in European homes … and not even [employed] by a single family, but by multiple ones.”⁶⁷ She urged the Muslim elite to fight harder for women’s education so that women could have other opportunities for income beyond domestic service.

Muslim commentators in the press emphasized the vulnerability of domestics at work, where they were at risk for sexual attack by their European bosses or fellow male servants. It bears noting that women’s safety at work was a concern in other contexts as well. The Algerian Office of Familial Action, which focused on European settlers in Algeria, released a pamphlet from their French counterparts on “the fight against public immorality,” which targeted cinemas and places of work as potential sites of immoral behavior.⁶⁸ It discussed how women were often the targets of harassment while at work. They recommended severe punishment for any men who abused their power, reminded people of their responsibility to be respectful, and advocated keeping children out of factories and other potentially immoral spaces. This demonstrates that while there was a particular concern for domestic workers in the Muslim press because of the privacy of their workplace, to some extent these concerns were shared by some members of settler society for women even in industrial workplace settings.

Newspapers occasionally reported on the sexual violence Muslim domestic workers faced. In 1928, for example, al-Najah reported that a Muslim male domestic worker had raped a Muslim female domestic worker in a European home in Tlemcen where they both worked.⁶⁹ While the matter was initially headed to court, the homeowner convinced the Muslim woman to marry her rapist. The newspaper applauded the Muslim woman for practicing “forgiveness” but presented the story as a troubling warning of what could happen when men and women worked side by side, and as a reminder of the vulnerable position of women who worked in service. They feared the story would “encourage other people to rape the local servants,” since the rapist was ultimately unpunished. This type of reporting about shocking sex crimes functioned to create a climate of fear around women’s new employment.⁷⁰

Oral interviews suggest that attitudes about domestic work varied between urban and rural peoples. Fatma Zohra Benaik, who was born in 1932 and grew up in Algiers, noted that domestic work was so common in the city by the 1940s that it was not at all seen as concerning, although she suggested that Muslims in smaller “villages tended to look down on” domestic work.⁷¹ Dahbia Lounas was born in 1933 and spent much of her life in the rural town of Mirabeau (today Draâ Ben Khedda) near Tizi Ouzou. She described how many women from her town worked as domestic workers in the 1930s and 1940s “despite the shame.”⁷²

Commentators questioned why women had to turn to such degrading work in the first place. Their answer was a failure of resources—both those designated by the family and those allocated by society or the French colonial state. At the familial level, blame was placed with fathers who had disinherited their daughters, particularly common in Kabyle families.⁷³ This idea of women as economically vulnerable was not entirely limited to domestic workers. The prominent interwar Moroccan reformist scholar al-Mahdi al-Wazzani described women as “poor by nature” and thus in need of financial security from their male dependents to ensure their well-being.⁷⁴ He argued, and many in Algeria echoed, that fathers needed to ensure that an appropriate portion of their inheritance was assigned to their daughters. In Algeria this lack of economic security from inheritance was then directly tied to women’s labor as domestic workers. An unsigned editorial in al-Najah chastised Muslim fathers “in so many cities and villages” who disobeyed the mandates of the Qur’an by leaving their inheritance only to their sons.⁷⁵ The author wrote that these fathers’ neglect for their daughters “forced [them] to work as a housemaid and to live in humiliation.” The state too, many argued, had failed to offer Muslim women education or skills training that would offer them another way to earn income. In 1928 al-Najah reported that the state had established a training factory for women in Ouargla, a Saharan town 600 kilometers south of Constantine. The editorial praised the factory for offering work to “poor women” so they would not be forced “to work as maids in European” homes.⁷⁶ Although the press depicted the Muslim domestic as small, desperate, and vulnerable, her mobility and the anxiety it provoked also suggest she should not be overlooked as an important social actor in the interwar landscape.

Women’s Growing Presence in the Changing City: A Conclusion

Urbanization created the conditions for domestic workers to step into public life in an unprecedented way. Yet domestic workers’ power in society was constrained in significant ways, including that they earned little pay, had little job security, were subject to harassment from their employers or other Muslim men at work, had limited power within their families, and lacked the respectability of other positions. For most Muslim women, the colonial economy and restrictions of life in a settler colony continued to stifle their daily lives despite their paid labor—as it stifled most opportunities for Muslim uplift.

Despite the plethora of literature that focuses on their silences, women, and domestics in particular, were not marginal in interwar Algerian society. Some, like Ben Drahou, engaged in public activism. Others collaborated on projects like the construction of new schools. A few acted on theater stages. Many frequented spaces like cinemas and music performances. Some of them were mothers to future leaders. The nationalist fighter Baya Hocine, for example, was born in 1940 in the casbah of Algiers. Her parents had recently migrated to Algiers from the Kabyle village Ighil Imoula. While her father worked a variety of inconsistent jobs, her mother brought in steady income as a domestic worker.⁷⁷ Muslim women participated en masse in demonstrations, like those in support of the Popular Front, a coalition of political parties on the Left including the SFIO and the Parti communiste français (French Communist Party). Photographs from June 1936 Popular Front protests show Muslim women dressed in haiks, with their long white veils, in a women’s section of the protests with fists raised (figures 2.3 and 2.4). Muslim women broadly and domestic workers in particular also contributed in meaningful ways to the anti-colonial struggle throughout the War of Independence, as Caroline de la Brac Perrière has shown in one of the only studies of domestic workers in Algeria.⁷⁸

When we hold these perspectives together—women like Rahma ben Drahou who worked as domestics and also engaged in public life in novel ways; French commentators insisting that Muslim women’s labor was a path to assimilation; and Muslim elites who struggled to make sense of their changing cities—we can see more clearly the tensions urbanization provoked. Scholars have described interwar urban life in Algeria as a bustling public environment on the eve of the rise of nationalism. Although not wholly inaccurate, this perspective leaves out the ways urban space was a contested terrain in which women’s bodies occupied an important position both for how they actually moved and what this movement represented to various communities. When we instead attend to those who questioned what would be lost because of women’s mobility, rather than only those who celebrated it, the heated debates that urbanization precipitated come more clearly into view.

In between the lines of commentators’ warnings about the danger of urban space were masculine anxieties about growing female power. This fear of women’s expanding power was not entirely imagined. While employment was difficult to find, sporadic, and low-earning for Muslim men, Muslim women earned more consistent income from their work as domestic workers. Their status as consistent wage earners in turn earned them the right to manage the family finances and complete the shopping for the home. Domestic workers’ movements to and from work also changed the optics of urban space and provoked anxiety within the press. Elite Muslim men were threatened enough by them that they wrote diatribes in the press railing against these women’s mobility and growing public presence.

Histories of interwar Algeria have rightly mapped how the period saw an enormous expansion in association life, café culture, and access to international news and cinema. Yet not all Algerians were enamored with these changes to their cities and public life. The scholarship on “new women” or the “modern girl” globally has focused on the transformative progress of the interwar years. Yet in Algeria the women in question who were newly mobile—domestic workers and a small number of students—did not have the buying power to grant them access to the new consumption patterns characteristic of the “modern girl.”⁷⁹ There is not enough evidence to suggest whether these women were also organizing themselves into the social or political movements of “new women” elsewhere. Still, their contested movement changes our view of a Muslim society in flux after urbanization in multiple ways.

Too disproportionate an attention to women’s growing power risks both too hastily characterizing women’s lives before the interwar years as entirely constrained and reproducing the colonial idea that the waged labor of domestic service was salvation from the incessant misery of Muslim patriarchy. Yet to dismiss these women as marginal further silences their impact on public life and the anxiety they provoked for what they represented: a rapidly changing Algeria.

The story of how domestic workers transformed the cities around them is a story about urban space. Working-class Muslim women transgressed the boundaries of their homes and neighborhoods en masse daily. As they did so, they broke with the norms for urban women. But this is also a story about the social friction and masculine anxiety that unfolded because of these women’s mobility. In between the lines of elite urban male commentators’ complaints about domestic service in the press was fear about how their cities were being remade by domestic workers. For them, women’s mobility was a troubling sign of how Algeria’s social fabric was beginning to unravel.⁸⁰ Of course, women’s labor and mobility were not the only sources of Muslim men’s anxiety. As the next two chapters illustrate, Muslim men were equally concerned about women’s limited access to education and dress, both of which, like labor, became discussions about larger issues relating to Muslim society and Algeria’s place in the world.