The purpose of this paper is two-fold: 1) to provide insight into the daily lives, practices, and feelings of children in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century; 2) to explore how we can access through primary sources the authentic voices of children in Egypt’s past. First, this paper argues that it is important to look not only at how Egyptian nationalists used children as a surrogate for the making of a new national identity, but also how children experienced the nationalists’ coercive and disciplinary usage of them. This paper will also consider how Egyptian children experienced the attitude towards them of British occupiers. Fear, love, and frustration emerge as reoccurring emotions in the daily lives of Egyptian children. Second, because children in Egypt’s past have left few sources and the sources they may have left generally reflect thoughts and patterns of behavior learned from adults, this paper deals with the question of whether or not an authentic voice of children can be found in sources. Some scholars hold that accessing the subjectivities of children (i.e. how they thought about themselves and their lives) cannot be achieved and so instead historians must look at how adults talked about children (discourse) and what adults did to/for children (actions and practices). This paper argues that Egyptian autobiographies of childhood are one avenue for accessing the authentic voice of Egyptian children in the past, heeding that these autobiographies can at times reflect more about the genre or time period in which they were written than the period of recollection. This paper will deal with a corpus of seven autobiographies of childhood written by Egyptians of differing class and gender who grew up in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century.