Headcoverings and Modest Dress

For awhile now I’ve been fascinated with the subject of headcoverings and the related issues of modest and plain dressing.  The fascination, as you might imagine (this is me here, after all), is not without some twinges of bafflement and aversion.  It’s always women, you see, who are charged with keeping modest, with keeping covered, with staying plain, and that bothers me on so many levels that I’d be here all night trying to sort them out.  Why are women held responsible for mens’ reactions?  That hardly seems fair.  I suspect there’s no way to explain it outside of a religious context; even if I were to share those religious convictions, I’m still not certain I’d understand it, or–perhaps more importantly–accept it.  But the fascination is there, nonetheless.

I started to become interested in headcoverings back while I was still dancing with the troupe; in the beginning, when we were mostly focused on American Tribal style, we usually wore turbans, which I had to learn to wrap.  I wasn’t that great at it, but I improved over time.  I’ve never been crazy about hats and hairstyles that leave my bare face hanging out there with no hair to soften it, but that’s a combination vanity/self-esteem issue on my part; half the time I think I’m hideous-looking and seek to obscure that fact with my big unruly Hermione hair.  But I digress.

With Middle Eastern dance came examination of Middle Eastern culture, and women’s place therein, and of course habits of dress.  I’ll admit that I developed an instant love for the flattering and very modest salwar kameez suits, and in fact own a couple of them.  I started looking into various headcovering styles suitable for dance, and different ways of wrapping a turban or tying a headscarf; some of them are very beautiful and becoming.  And then I started to learn about other women who covered their heads as well.

For several years I’ve done 18th century historical reenactment with my husband, and at nearly all events nearly all the women present cover their heads in some way.  It was common (though by no means universal) practice then, and it’s very much expected in reenactment circles now.  I balked at it big-time for quite a while, for all the reasons you might expect:

*  The religious connotations of women having to cover their heads, be submissive, whatever

*  Dude, I look like someone’s hideous grandmother in this doily

And so forth.  I eventually found some slightly more becoming caps, and interesting hats, so I got over myself and learned to have some fun with it.  I’ve actually come to like having stuff on my head.  But I’m still not certain WHY.

It’s not a religious thing for me.  The religious aspects of headcovering seem to be rooted in things that are somewhere between merely alien and entirely anathema to my worldview–ideas of female submission and male headship and so forth.  And yet, there is a burning curiosity in me.  I want to know if the world would view me differently if I were to go out with my head covered.  I already tend to dress somewhat modestly–at least, to my mind it’s modest, compared to the hoochie stuff that so many females tend to wear–what would be the reaction if I covered my head?  Would people think I belonged to some strange religious sect?  I doubt my pale blue-eyed self would be taken as muslima.  Maybe they’d think I had some terrible illness–no, they wouldn’t, even if I covered every bit of it there’d still be no mistaking the fact that I have a full head of long, thick hair.  More importantly, how would I react to me?  Part of me really wants to attend a religious service, like a Tridentine Mass, dressed very modestly and with my head veiled.  Why I want to have this experience is a mystery to me.  I’d equally like to attend synagogue, and an Orthodox Christian service.  I want to have a small taste of these things that are so foreign to my experience, to try and understand even for a moment how others experience the numinous, and what that might mean to them.  Doing something different, like covering my head, seems like it would help me to make the sort of shift in consciousness necessary to gaining even the slightest inkling of understanding.

Must be the writer in me, the part that continually pushes for differing experiences, for endless curiousity and contemplation.  It’s troublesome at times, but after all these years I’ve grown accustomed to it.

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