Gender, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in a Trans-Mediterranean Perspective: Female Migration from Trieste’s Littoral to Egypt, 1860–1960

Combining multi-site archival research, oral history, public discourse analysis, literary sources and folklore, this paper investigates a peculiar wave of female labour migration from the Primorska (the Trieste ‘Littoral’), on the border between present-day Slovenia and Italy, and its rural hinterland, the Julian March, in present-day Italy and the Vipava Valley, in today’s Slovenia, to Egypt from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. During that period, thousands of women left their native economically depressed rural areas for Egypt, via Trieste. In Egypt, women and girls from the Littoral were in high demand as nannies and governesses for the affluent Levantine elites residing in booming cosmopolitan cities such as Alexandria and Cairo. More specifically, this paper looks at how the subjectivities of these migrant women were socially constructed in between Trieste and cosmopolitan Egypt and it traces their role within the emergent nationalist and cosmopolitan social orders of which they were a part.