| Summary: | The study focuses on five women’s accounts of travel in the Algerian Sahara between 1860 and 1900, a pioneering period. Sedentary women from the oases and nomadic women from the tents, Arabs, Berbers and Africans, are presented in their reserved spaces in individualised portraits, with the dialogues that are reproduced attesting to the difficulty of intercultural communication, or within an orientalist or even feminist ethnographic discourse. The women travellers reveal the oppression suffered by women; the euphemisation of the many servitudes, particularly persistent slavery; the presuppositions and reveries about “races”; a certain confusion about the Ouled Naïl phenomenon; the superiority of Western women’s lifestyles and of colonisation.
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