The Headscarf and the Republic

Abstract

As far as the issue of the veil is concerned, feminists are unanimous in condemning the oppression that it signifies. But they are just as divided as the other social spheres when it comes to finding a solution to the question that has been put to us—should the schoolgirls who wear it be expelled from school or not?—and they are better aware of the dimension that, at the beginning, was very much secondary in the eyes of the case’s protagonists: the question of equality between men and women. This principle must be taken into consideration. But, once again, this must be done in the French national sphere: in the neighborhoods to which housing politics has confined immigrant workers on the one hand and in a country that fears the institutionalization of “minority communities” on the other.

Editors’ note: this article refers to the controversy that began in September 1989 when three young women students attended their high school in the town of Creil wearing Islamic headscarves (often erroneously called a “veil”) and were expelled for challenging the secular nature of public schools in France. This highly debated event galvanized, and divided, immigrant groups, feminists, politicians, and intellectuals, and led to a number of official compromises by successive ministers of education.