Mary Connelly:
On Friday 2nd April, I was preparing to make my way to Church for Good Friday service. The service is the most solemn in the Christian church – when we walk with Christ to Calvary and witness his execution. It is a day of mourning, and as I was getting ready, I realised that this Friday, I wasn’t dressed properly for the occasion.
The dress for Good Friday is as that for any funeral and, while I have the smart black clothes, I realised on Holy Wednesday evening that I have nothing with which to cover my hair.
Many people don’t realise, if they haven’t attended a Catholic Mass, that covering your hair, if you are a woman, is a very strong tradition. Many of you reading this will think of nuns’ habits – those, often elderly, ladies wearing their grey, blue or black headscarves, which cover their hair and forehead. Less will think of the mantilla, the headscarf worn by Catholic women to Mass as a sign of modesty and piety. Made of lace, the veil covers the head and shoulders of the woman wearing it, and they’re often quite beautiful. I am not a very strict Catholic, and have never worn one, but I know and have seen many women who do. Nevertheless, without something for my head on Friday, I felt like I hadn’t really made the effort.
When we talk about religious dress, especially with regards to women and their hair, more often than not we think of Muslim women and their own types of veil. Are they subjugated? Why would a woman want to wear that? But they are not the only ones. Good Friday is the only day I wear a veil, and only in church, but there are some Christian women who wear some kind of head covering all the time. Women in some Baptist Churches dress ‘modestly’ all the time – long skirts, long sleeves and a small, triangular scarf on their head. Are they oppressed? I’ve never asked, but they seem happy enough. Nuns and monks wear unusual clothes, ones that are not worn by the rest of us, every day. They have to for their faith and, effectively, for their job. But most of us wouldn’t consider them to be victims of their orders.
Piety, faith, dress, they are all individual things. If a woman can be forced to wear a veil, by extension anyone can be forced to wear anything by their parents, spouse or community. If someone told me, on Friday, that I could not wear a chapel veil, of another type of head covering - would it not be them who was oppressing me?
These are questions that are worth asking – if we want to ‘liberate’ Muslim women from their hijabs, should we not also be liberating people from religious orders? Should we not be liberating me? Or perhaps we should liberate ourselves from prejudice and from fear- and allow these women to wear what they feel they should.