Cover Your Head

I heard recently that the hijab is becoming a fashion statement in Jordan. Traditionally a symbol of female modesty and method of shielding women from the eyes of men, the Muslim head scarf is now a way that some women express their fashion sense.

I know all about women’s head-coverings-turned-fashionstatements. Growing up in a Mennonite church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 1980s, I looked with envy at the older girls who got to wear prayer coverings because they’d been baptized. Women in certain Mennonite groups wear coverings because of the Apostle Paul’s admonition in I Corinthians that women pray and prophesy only with their heads covered. Some Mennonite women wear them all the time, taking them off only to sleep; others wear them only to church on Sunday morning.

Like the hijab, which in most Muslim countries is donned at puberty, the covering became a badge of womanhood for my friends and me—especially for those of us with breasts and hips that showed up long after we’d sent out search parties. I was thrilled, then, on the morning of my own baptism, when my mother pinned the lacy doily on my head with straight pins. I stood before the bathroom mirror, my back turned and holding another mirror, to get the full measure of my rear view, as pleased with my appearance as my salvation.

By the 1980s, most of the teenage girls and women in my church wore coverings only on Sundays, so that during the rest of the week we looked like everyone else. But every Sunday morning before church, we’d grab our coverings from shelves or drawers—or, in my family’s case, from the fabric-covered panel inside the roof of our station wagon where we pinned them, folded in quarters, like moths to a display case. Then we’d center them carefully on our heads, sticking the pins down and swiftly up again, careful not to muss up the curled bangs and feathered sides we’d worked so hard to sculpt.

The coverings we wore weren’t the white pleated organdy caps of our grandmothers, the big ones that sat stiffl y on your head like a poufy halo. Ours were flat lace doilies, not unlike the ones you put under vases; “chapel caps,” we called them. They looked best perched atop longish hair, which is what most of us had until we hit college or in some other way gained some distance from our fathers’ dictates. Many of us owned enough to color-coordinate them to our clothes. My sister’s stash included navy, burgundy, black, brown and white ones, which she expertly selected each Sunday depending on whether she was seeking a coordinating or contrasting color scheme for that morning’s outfit.

Just as Muslim women’s coverings range from the burqa (a full-body garment), to a fashionably-wound fuchsia hijab, as well as everything in between, there exists a complex syntax of prayer veilings among Mennonites that few outsiders can parse. Size, shape, placement, type of fabric, frequency of usage, style of hair underneath, whether it has strings, what color the strings are, whether the covering covers the ears and how much hair sticks out in front: these are the elements you must be able to read in their various combinations. The code reveals the level of conservatism of the wearer, her geographic location, her church affiliation and sometimes even her personality. I remember feeling a mixture of pity and admiration for the plain girls who had to wear coverings large as serving bowls but who would comb their hair so that it billowed out suggestively above their foreheads or hung in wisps above their ears. Rebellion grows toward whatever light it can find.

Only when I became a senior in high school did I start resenting my own Sunday-morning covering as an icon of patriarchy. Because woman was created “for the sake of man,” the apostle Paul writes, “a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head.” Somewhere around 1990, my sister, my mother and I got a little peeved with Paul and his ideas about why women exist, so we folded up our coverings and slipped them into drawers for good.

I can’t say I miss my coverings, but sometimes I think about them, and wish that I’d at least kept one. There was something pretty about them; in fact, while I never would have had the nerve to ask any of my male peers— and I still don’t—I sometimes wonder whether the boys in our church found anything sexy about coverings. I wonder whether there was something about their thin laciness, the way they covered but didn’t cover, that whispered of the bras and panties that the boys wouldn’t see until they married one of us or in some other way got lucky.

If our coverings were alluring in any way, I’m not sure that any of us as girls consciously knew it, but I think we intuited their diaphanous power, their demure evocation. Even if the boys weren’t seduced by them, I think we were, in a way. The caps designed to put us in our place became habits of self-expression, declarations of our own beauty.

The feminine has a way of folding up the symbols of its own subjugation. It knows some origami of resistance that diminishes the size of oppression while somehow increasing its loveliness. It has a way of pleating the hijab and the prayer veiling into ever smaller triangles, until you can’t tell which side is up and which is down, which side is compliance and which desire.

Valerie Weaver-Zercher is a writer in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her essays, book reviews and features have appeared in Brain, Child, Sojourners, Christian Century, Christianity Today, and Books & Culture.

~Valerie Weaver-Zercher