A painting of a poor Coptic woman in the 19th Century and her child By the French artist Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat
This is a beautiful Coptic woman with her child who lies asleep on her shoulder. Initially I was a little shocked by this photograph, but I realized that her poverty dictated her dress code, and even though her shirt reveals part of her bosom, which may also be shocking to some, in a conservative country such as Egypt, where women walk in the streets completely covered , the Lady in the painting is not showing any sign of depravity or cheapness, just the warmth of motherhood.
In vintage photographs of the 19th century I have noticed that some children actually had no clothes on. In Egypt in the 19th century it was observed that the poorest of the country could not always afford clothes and went partly naked:, even today the poor Egyptian families cannot afford the luxury of clothes. When living in Luxor I asked once how much the cleaners received for wages at the hotel, and I was shocked when I was told they earnt 120 Egyptian a month, at that time it was the equivalent of 12 English pounds, which is the basic price of a djellabar. Today some Egyptian families all live in one house, with various generations of the family, as they cannot afford to live any other way.
Amelia Edwards comments in her book 'A Thousand Miles up the Nile 'I have often seen, in this country, women but half covered with miserable rags; and several times, females in the prime of womanhood, and others in more advanced age, with nothing on the body but a narrow strip of rag bound round the hips.
In personally have visited the home of a poor Egyptian family on the West Bank of Luxor, their home was made of mud bricks, and they had no furniture in their home, just a bed and a wardrobe, and the wrapper from the bar of 'Lux'soap that obviously had been bought for them from a tourist, but to their pride they had photograph of one of their son's on the wall dressed in the attire of the Egyptian Army.
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