In January 1892, the Cairo newspaper al-Mu’ayyad reported that a woman from Minufiyya province – in the delta north of Egypt's capital – had gone to court seeking a divorce. Her husband, with eight years in prison behind him, faced seven more. When the court refused her request, ‘she worked out a stratagem to rid herself of boredom and irritation’. The woman baked a delicacy beloved of Egyptians, fatira, a rich layered pastry. She awaited her husband along the route by which he would descend the jabal, returning to prison from the day's hard labour. He and five work-crew prison mates ate the fatira. All became ill and two died – the husband not among them. The fatira enveloped poisoned filling.

This woman who tried to poison her husband, remarked al-Mu’ayyad, had been sought in marriage by her first cousin. Editorialising about motives (in shedding her husband she wished to shed ‘boredom and irritation’), al-Mu’ayyad suggested she acted selfishly; it did not broach other possibilities: economic need? social vulnerability? the right to sexual satisfaction as stipulated in Islamic jurisprudence?

In al-Mu’ayyad's local reportage, female subjects in public spaces appeared often as disruptive forces (disprivileged-class adult females) or cherished-but-fragile national commodities (privileged-class schoolgirls, ‘public space’ a gender-segregated classroom). Terse, dramatic reports of incidents and crimes also sketched females as objects of transaction handled by males: relatives, husbands, state employees. As schoolgirl, the female figure emblematised the state's benevolent modernising energies. As woman on the street – spectacle – she signalled a world out of control.

Such vignettes provided fodder for newspaper commentaries on how gender segregation practices meant to guarantee public morals were breaking down. Representations of women and girls in the Egyptian press were not innocent given the era's fierce debates on present and optimal gendered practices in the context of Egyptians’ struggle for independence, and an intensely articulated concern over public order. Representations in al-Mu’ayyad of sexed bodies poised along a range of gendered social practices; bodies as points of access to particular political configurations, physical spaces and modes of legitimacy: these were key to crafting competing visions of what modernity meant, how to perform it, and who would have access to it.