To browse Academia. Skip to main content. You're using an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer. Log In Sign Up. Liat Kozma. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under 18 Girls, Labor, and Sex in Precolonial Egypt, β liat kozma On the night of October 8, , a girl named Sariyya was crushed to death in a cotton press factory in Alexandria.
The accident took place after dark, in the female section of the factory. The division of labor in the factory was gendered: while the men were responsible for pressing the cotton on the upper level, the women dealt with the cotton that came out of the shafts of the pressing machine on the lower level. The woman in charge of the female workers, a woman named Imbaraka, sat outside of the factory at the time of the accident. She explained that she usually left the room after help- ing the workers settle in their positions and did not see her presence there as necessary.
Girls rarely left their own narratives in writing, and their stories are usually mediated through the perspective of adults: reformers, parents, doctors, educators, judges, and adults narrating their own childhood.
In this chapter I examine U. I build on existing liter- ature about the history of childhood as well as the history of children. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under responsibility of the family and the community. In this context, child mar- riage, labor, and slavery became state concerns. Girls in the later decades of the nineteenth century experienced more legal and medical intervention than their mothers had.
At the same time, however, this intervention cre- ated more room for negotiation. Islamic courts handled such questions mostly in the con- text of family disputes, principally over child marriage and child custody. An adult woman, unlike a girl, was physically capable of assuming adult roles, namely, having sexual intercourse with her husband and bearing children.
