Poverty is a contentious and complex construct, an archetypal “thick” discourse, encapsulating the traces of social, economic, political, and historical struggles. Diverse poverty scenarios past and present all share a gendered core with specific cultural form and meaning. The author argues that gendering, the most powerful technique of social ordering at the heart of modernity, helped launch European poverty discourses and policies into the global orbit. From medieval Europe to the present and following the pathways of “poverty” projects across cultures, gender dynamically draws around itself a changing cloak of corporality, values, dispositions, practices, materialities, and legal regulations. At defining historical moments, these gendered forms became attached to other social arrangements of inequality, like class and race, but also to spatial divisions between “private” and “public” and a temporal contrast between the so-called primitive and civilized. Interventions in the name of Western poverty constructs led to an increasing feminization of poverty and the poor worldwide, woven from perceived attributes of domesticity, dependency, and deviancy.