EDITORIAL: Of women, hair and shoes

OPINION:

Women, God love ’em, have always been obsessed by what they wear at head and foot: hair and shoes. They’re very particular, which pleases men, inappropriate as that might be. Compliments offend some women today, but they’re still universally particular about their hair and their shoes. There’s never enough time to deal with either one.

Once upon a time a proper lady never left home, even if only to take a streetcar to shop downtown, without her hat and gloves. Church women often wore a small piece of lace or embroidered cloth pinned to their hair as a mark of respect for the holy. The custom is apparently derived from the custom of Jewish men covering their heads in similar respect, sometimes only in a synagogue and sometimes elsewhere.

Hairstyles have come and gone, from the frizzled “permanents” of the 1930s to the current fashion of the middle part, letting the hair fall straight from the shoulder. No television network blonde, whether the color is natural or bottled, can deliver the news without good hair. Good cheekbones preferred, but not necessary.

Now there’s a contentious new hair covering in the debate in the West. “Hijab,” an Arabic word that means “barrier,” or “partition,” defines the head covering worn by many Muslim women. It’s even more fraught than that, the last remnant of the burkha, a head-to-foot shroud-like veil, usually black. The garment makes women all but anonymous on a Muslim street. The severe version of these full-body wrappings has only a slit for the eyes. But whatever the other elaborate explanations, it’s often seen as an emblem of the subjugation and second-class citizenship of women in traditional Islamic societies.

Some Muslims defend the garments and their related coverings as protection for the purity of the female in “the jungle out there,” but it’s a symbol as well for the place assigned to women in the patriarchal Islamic society. There was a typical controversy about it in France, the “l’affaire du voile,” or “scandal of the veil,” in 1989. After a contentious debate about the integration into the French culture of 2 million Muslims, the argument was resolved, more or less, by forbidding the hijab in educational institutions.

In December 2003, President Jacques Chirac initiated “the veil law” forbidding “ostentatious” religious articles, including the hijab, the Jewish yarmulke and Christian jewelry in public schools. Frenchmen who support a determined secular society, often the source of French civil conflict in the past, insist on rigid separation of apparel and state.

In the United States, anyone is free to wear whatever she chooses, though there was once a mini-controversy over whether a Muslim woman could wear the severe covering with eye slits when sitting for a driver’s-license photograph. Recently, some young women who aren’t Muslims have started wearing the coverings as a mark of solidarity with Muslim women.

This perhaps reflects President Obama’s concern about “Islamaphobia” in the land, though since the events of 9/11 there has been remarkably little overt hostility to Muslims beyond the occasional dark look or angry word that Americans often aim at each other. Cynthia Eller, a professor of women and religion at Claremont Graduate University in California, tells the Christian Science Monitor that the Islamic headscarf is a “tormented issue” for some young women in America.

“You want to support women who want to wear this as well as women who don’t,” she says. “But the politics of the headscarf, especially in an American context … pushes the problem of male predatory sexuality back on women as if women are supposed to dress in such way so as not to make themselves enticing to men. We shouldn’t have to dress in a particular way,” she says. Indeed.