As the household became a metaphor for Egypt's engagement with “modernity,” the presence of domestic servants and slaves had somehow to be addressed, and the other six Sudanese women thus served as “boundary markers” (as Anne McClintock labels the role of domestics in Victorian culture) in that they were examples of “evolutionary belatedness evidenced by their ‘feminine’ lack of history, reason and proper domestic arrangements.”

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 109