Georgia, USA: Little Girls in Headscarves

Mary Grabar, April 2007

Author Mary Grabar was the daughter of traditional Eastern European immigrants who believed in repressing females as a matter of course. But she was able to leave that constraint behind and grow into a free individual because she attended an American school ...

In this piece, she notes with alarm the quiet invasion of misogynous Muslims into her community. She sees a little girl in traditional Islamic dress, and fears that today’s classroom will not provide that child with the liberation that schools of Grabar’s time allowed:

"One afternoon, deep in the poetic reverie the lake and trees and birds inspire, I came across a sight spooky against this natural sunny backdrop: a woman completely swathed in black with only slits for her eyes. The incongruous sight of women, peering out of slits of cloth, in full Islamic regalia, behind the wheels of minivans or paying for goat meat at the Publix is no longer that unusual in my neighborhood, though it still takes me aback. But here on a sunny afternoon, amidst ducks and geese, and gazebos and picnic tables, came this creature who looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past with two small children: the boy around four years old dressed in typical Western clothing of pants and a shirt. The girl, about age seven, wore the traditional headscarf and long dress.

... particularly for those who do not speak the language, facial expressions convey meaning and indicate good will and friendship. I was so used to greeting everyone I passed around the lake with a smile and a hello that in this context the isolation of this woman glared. For all their Simone de Beauvoir-inspired academic talk and analysis about the "gaze," feminists cannot see this blatant disregard for the connection of the woman, particularly the woman who cannot speak the language, with the outside world. Not even able to feel the sun on her skin, the woman was cut off from the human community, encased in a shroud ...

But as I remember the little girl in her headscarf in 2007 I see no such future for her. Indeed it is becoming more common to see college women wearing the traditional scarves, sometimes with blue jeans ... Marie Claire promoted such attire as adapted by designers. The hijab is chic ...

Given the messages of "coexistence," and the dogma of multiculturalism that pervades our educational system, the little girl in the scarf will have nowhere to turn for an alternative to her seventh-century culture ...

Little do the multiculturalists care about the little girl who will become like her mother, walking in a prison of black cloth, isolated, without identity, not even able to feel the sun. But they are the same ones, the ones who so detest their own culture, that they are blind to the barbarism in our midst. It may be too late for the woman swathed in black, but we need to reach her daughter."

Brenda Walker at VDARE comments ...

Am I the only woman who thinks that welcoming millions of these seventh-century misogynous cretins via immigration is as dumb as it gets?

More: American Spectator, VDARE