Gendered Thievery: Women, Shoplifting, Petty Theft, and Money Forgery in Interwar Egypt

This paper examines the proliferation of thievery and petty crimes committed by women as an important part of social transformation associated with rapid urbanization and industrialization in interwar Egypt. During these crucial decades, the nationalist Bank Misr established the largest textile company in the town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra. Thousands of men and the women across the country migrated to the booming town seeking employment opportunities and urban life pleasures. While the population of the town almost tripled in few decades, a sizeable number of the urbanites and newcomers had to live in the socioeconomic margin and outside the boundaries of laws.

I examine the gendered aspects of the continuingly enlarged social margin when many women committed petty theft, shopliftings, pick-pocketing, money forgery, and drug dealing. Rather than victimizing marginalized women or studying female in thievery as middle class kleptomania, I argue that resorting to the underworld of crime was a rational choice of working class women to negotiate rapidly changing urban job market and to cope with new consummation patterns. In doing so, they challenged the social notion of gender division in criminal business and the state’s policies concerning security and public order in the urban space.