@*julia*2010 wrote:Should you feel oppressed when you go to school, which requires students to wear uniform?
hijab is not the same as school
uniform. there are girls who are
required to wear a hijab to school
but not all are allowed to take it
off outside of school. yes, i would
feel opressed if i was pressured to
wear it all the time.
I remember when I lived in Vaucluse in Sydney back in 1960s and kids from all the posh schools had to wear their winter school uniform, which included woolen hat and blazer, until certain date (end of winter). They were not allowed to take the hat and blazer off in public, even when temperatures were in high, and the buses were like ovens. I thought it was shocking to treat kids like that, but everybody else thought it was OK.
By the way, Muslim women only wear hijab in public, when at home and with their family & friends they wear what ever they want. But why is everybody so hysterical about hijab, nobody seems to be saying that Jewish women who are also not allowed in public showing their hair, are oppressed, WHY?
In any case the point of the video clip was not whether hijab is oppressive or not, but that we are saying that woman's only power is in her sexuality, take it away and she is oppressed and disempowered.
Another thing is that hijab and burqua, and various other robes style dresses were around for much longer than Islam.
No doubt all over robes and face covering was very useful when you travelled across desert in sand storm, and therefore it was worn by both men and women.
And i think that women in Hijab can be very elegant
@*julia*2010 wrote:that's very informative and does make
sense so thank you for that, but i am
particularly interested in what makes you
think that dressing a certain way while
in church was a form of oppression.
is it because the burden was on women?
is it because they had no choice? they
were forced to dress a certain way?
oppression is a strong word; could it simply
mean not having a choice?
WARNING! SCROLLER!
Well, I said I’d do some thinking overnight and get back to you, so here I am. The more I thought about it the more complicated I realized it all was so bear with me while I try to explain. (I suspect you are going to wish you'd never asked 
)
First, there are two things I need to make clear.
- 1)I am looking at the situation from two very different perspectives, the one I had as a child and teenager and the one have now. Each is equally valid within its context.
- 2) Although I did, as an adult, take issue with many of the church’s teachings and practices, they were not the reason I eventually left. As I said, change has to come from within and I have many Catholic friends who are actively working to bring about that change. The only reason I am no longer a Catholic is because there came a point when I was no longer able to convince myself there was a God.
So, to the nitty gritty. Was I oppressed? You commented that oppression is a very strong word – it is certainly a very emotive one. Perhaps repressed or disempowered would be better – and, with hindsight, yes I was disempowered. All the authority figures in my religion were male: God (whether manifesting as the Father, Son or Holy Spirit) was male; the archangels, Michael and Gabriel, were male, the Pope was male; and so it went, down through the ranks through priests, deacons and acolytes right down to the littlest altar boys. Even the archenemy, Satan was a male figure.
The only important female figure was Mary – and she was held up to us as a shining example of all the female virtues: chastity, humility and obedience. Eve, of course was the other side of the coin, the eternal temptress or femme fatale, but even in this story it was always Adam who was portrayed as the protagonist - Eve was merely the instrument of his downfall. She may have been the first one to take a bite of the apple, but it was Adam’s doing so that brought down the wrath of God on him and all his descendants.. One gets the impression that if he had said "no", Eve’s transgression would have been overlooked – she just wasn’t important enough in the scheme of things.
Now, remember I am writing this with the benefit of hindsight – and the feminist movement. At the time it never occurred to me to question it. It was just the way things were – and were meant to be – and I think the reason I was so complacent was because what was happening within the church was pretty much a reflection of what was happening in the rest of my world. I was born in 1941, so grew up in the post war years, when jobs had to be found for the thousands of returning servicemen, and women – married women in particular, were being pressured into making room for them. Unless she was a high powered professional with a live-in nanny, it wasn’t ‘cool’ for a middle class woman to back to work once she married. It reflected badly on her as wife and mother and it reflected badly on her husband who would be seen as failing in his role as breadwinner. Hence, our sympathy for those poor oppressed Soviet wives.
All this may seem a long way from a discussion about headwear, but it is not irrelevant. It explains why I never questioned my obligation to cover my head in church; why I never asked – or even wondered – what it symbolised or why it was deemed necessary, It was just a cultural requirement of the community to which I belonged. I think the same thing applies to the vast majority of Muslim girls today. It is simply the norm for them, it doesn’t bother them or make them feel oppressed or disempowered; and, let’s face it, in some ways, many of them today have far more options in life than I did at their age.
