Between Port Cities: Women Travelling Alone around the Mediterranean

Early twentieth century debates around traffic in women gave rise to unprecedented concern with women travelling alone. Women were indeed travelling alone in unparalleled scales - the steamboat and train made travel more affordable than ever before, and North African cities offered new opportunities to non-elite Europeans, who enjoyed legal privilege in Europe's colonies. Thus, women traveled from Marseille to Alexandria, Algiers and Tunis – sometimes for prostitution, but more often – to work as nannies, to join family members who already settled there, or to marry indigenous men.  

To anti-traffic advocates, women travelling alone were potential traffic victims; to government authorities, they were potential "undesirables". French and British legislation in North Africa and the Levant was devised to limit the migration of women who traveled without male tutelage, or planned to work as entertainers in the city of destination. French and British volunteers, moreover, waited upon arriving women and rescued them from their presumed fate in brothels or in an Arab or Berber household. Young women, on their part, boarded on shore dressed as crewmen, acquired forged documents, and escaped those shelters which were designed to protect them.

The proposed paper is based on French and British diplomatic archives as well as feminist press and archives to trace the various mechanisms devised, around the Mediterranean, to contain the mobility of these women, and then the ways these women did find to travel around the Mediterranean.