Above, you see Raja in full niqab – her one and only outfit for going out of her house. Raja wears the full veil for God, but there are other motivations just beneath the surface. “It covers many flaws. When I’m on the street I feel respect. No-one knows what is beneath, they do not know if I am beautiful or not.”
Would you have imagined that the woman beneath is a greying 39 year old wearing a pink outfit with the words ‘LOVE GIRL’ across the front?
In Egypt, women leave girlhood quickly. It’s exciting for young girls to first wear the veil at puberty, and to get engaged and married young, but when the lonely responsibility of being wife, mother and homemaker, with little support or companionship, settles heavy on their shoulders they long for that girlhood back.
We saw it in their girlish clothes, and in the stuffed toys and Disney characters throughout their houses. We saw it in their weekly visits to their own mothers – an effort to lighten the load.
It’s not that these women want to be younger, but rather that they miss the lightness and fun of being a girl.
Challenge: Give them back a little sense of girlhood.
Would you have imagined that the woman beneath is a greying 39 year old wearing a pink outfit with the words ‘LOVE GIRL’ across the front?
In Egypt, women leave girlhood quickly. It’s exciting for young girls to first wear the veil at puberty, and to get engaged and married young, but when the lonely responsibility of being wife, mother and homemaker, with little support or companionship, settles heavy on their shoulders they long for that girlhood back.
We saw it in their girlish clothes, and in the stuffed toys and Disney characters throughout their houses. We saw it in their weekly visits to their own mothers – an effort to lighten the load.
It’s not that these women want to be younger, but rather that they miss the lightness and fun of being a girl.
Challenge: Give them back a little sense of girlhood.
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