Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt by Hanan Hammad (review)

As the subtitle of her book proclaims, Hanan Hammad has written an account that brings together several distinct strands of social change in the first half of the 20th century and in so doing sheds new light on the history of industrialization and the creation of an industrial workforce in Egypt. It raises, sometimes explicitly and at other times implicitly, crucial questions about the direction of the study of Egyptian social history, about important aspects of the study of labor history more generally, and about the evolution of Egypt’s public policies for spurring economic growth.

Through a careful study of records, including many held in the Egyptian National Archives, the local courts, and the Misr Company for Spinning and Weaving, Professor Hammad has written a remarkable account that centers on the experiences of Egyptian women during a period of rapid urban growth based on industrialization in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla al-Kubra. Hammad sets her task as the study of the making of the modern urban norm in Egypt and the normalization of urban life. Specifically, she is interested in the ways in which attitudes, subjectivities, practices, and access to property changed as one of the provincial cities most associated with industrialization in Egypt grew during the first four decades of the 20th century. There can be no doubt that Mahalla is closely associated — to the point of metonomy — with Egyptian industrialization. It was the site of the largest industrial establishment in 20th century Egypt, the Misr Company for Spinning and Weaving (MCSW). The company was created by the Bank Misr group, which was nearly synonymous in the 1920s and 1930s with the struggle by local business elites to create independent industry in the country.

In Egypt today, Mahalla is still widely considered the cradle of working class protest. The April 6 Youth Movement, often credited with initiating the 2011 revolutionary movement, was created in the hope of linking political activists in the capital with working class protest in the textile factories of Mahalla. For students of Egyptian industrialization and working class politics, Mahalla also plays a central role as the site of what, in Marxist analysis, was seen as the location in which workers most like the European proletariat had been created. As Hammad notes, previous studies of working-class institutions and politics in Egypt have almost invariably viewed the process of proletarianization as a male experience and the process of industrialization as one that occurred more or less exclusively in the confines of the factory.

Hammad’s extensive research provides considerable detail on women in the spinning and weaving works. It appears that women made up somewhat less than 10% of MCSW employees and were concentrated in unskilled tasks. The company insisted on hiring unmarried women, and women were rarely allowed to acquire greater skills. In addition, it is clear that many of the immediate supervisors of shop floor employees (which would include the women) used abusive language and physical abuse to discipline workers and that women were additionally subject to more direct forms of sexual harassment. Hammad also suggests that women were employed in small workshops where production was primarily on handlooms or mechanical equipment discarded by MCSW and where wages would have been lower than in the large industrial establishments. Industrial employment may have been, as Hammad argues, attractive to women from the countryside, but according to her account, difficult working conditions, social stigma, and low wages must have limited the entry of women into industrial work.

Hammad explores other forms of work available to women, including sex work. Mahalla, she writes, had licensed prostitution by the late 19^th century, well before mechanized textile production attracted tens of thousands of newcomers to the city. Inhabitants of Mahalla appear to have been tolerant of what occurred in the urban quarters devoted to the sex trade. Unlike Cairo and Alexandria where the sex trade was often associated with foreigners, most...