"She Will Eat Your Shirt": Foreign Migrant Women as Brothel Keepers in Port Said and along the Suez Canal, 1880–1914

Abstract

“D e p o l i c e n o t h i n g t o m e . . . . My consul my policeman and judge, too.” Thus did a tall, dark woman of undetermined nationality, wrapped in a spangled red gown of some filmy material explain her business as a brothel keeper in early twentieth-century Port Said. “My consul good honest gentleman,” she continued in broken English. “He no going close house and stop woman make living.” Like her, hundreds of foreign women of Austrian, Russian, Greek, French, or other descent had set up prostitution ventures in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Egypt. According to William N. Willis, the author of several polemical works on the subject of the so-called “white slave trade” (the international hysteria around the specter of the abduction and exploitation of white women in non-European contexts), these women had a keen eye to their business and the safety thereof, nurtured faith in the diplomats who had been dispatched in Egypt as their consular representatives, and defied attempts by the Egyptian government to interfere with their trade. Willis disparagingly described foreign brothel keepers as coarse, bold, and embellished harpies with mercenary souls and plump red hands.1 Some of the women in the