Hmm….this is not a picture of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or a picture attached to any place, time, or context. Without such, the message is that the burqa alone, sans context, with no knowledge of who these women are or how they feel, stands for oppression and slavery.
Well, the piece you link to is about the most Orwellian piece of writing I’ve seen in some time, Dance. Its argument ends by claiming that the burqa symbolizes – or will, eventually, come to symbolize — a state’s commitment to diversity and equality.
Certainly no simplistic argument could go from the publicly confining, individuality-eviscerating reality of the burqa in democratic and non-democratic societies to a celebration of them as expressions of free non-conformity and individuality.
As horribly repressive regimes like France outlaw the burqa, he argues, the fully veiled woman will begin in more advanced countries to “exemplify a state that knows that its role is to promote equality, protect diversity…”
Both you and the op/ed writer refer to how the woman feels in and about her burqa as an important component of this issue. But the state — France, Turkey, whatever — need have no interest in her feelings and interpretations. These are in any case unavailable to us, since we can never know to what extent she feels coerced to say certain things. It certainly looks, however, as though she exists in a larger reality of oppression.
Which is another perplexing thing about the op/ed that you link to.
Did the writer not read the interview with the burqa-clad woman denied French citizenship? And with her husband? Her husband is desperate to leave France because it doesn’t know enough to cover its women. The woman is described by a number of observers as totally under the control of her husband and children.
In any case, she is a citizen of a state that stands for certain democratic principles, and that recognizes her erasure
— a piece that clarifies the transnational reality of the burqa, and the in fact very clear ideology from which it emerges.)
— that recognizes her erasure as at fundamental odds with the democratic values of that state. The state, in other words, is under no compulsion to uncover the true feelings of every covered woman in its borders. It has a duty, rather, to understand its own founding principles, and to recognize and protect itself from gross insults to them.
Agreed on the duty of the state. France’s action, however, does nothing to accomplish that goal. I’m not particularly persuaded by dueling NY Times op-ed pieces on the subject. Rather, I’d look to France’s own statements on what it stands for, and the effects of this policy on it, to determine how the current government is doing living up to the duty you correctly identify.
For starters, France’s motto is "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". This policy would seem in conflict with Liberty (as you’re removing the choice from the woman) and Equality (who else will be subject to similar attire-based restrictions?). Fraternity (as long as we forgive the implicitly gendered language) is trickier. It will probably be a net win (greater sense of inclusion in the surrounding society), but don’t discount the effects of isolating the woman in question from her existing local/familial/religious community.
Okay, let’s set the catchy motto aside and look for something a bit more substantial. The relevant sections from Article 1 of France’s current constitution, as revised, read:
"[France] shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs."
This seems a pretty clear violation of respecting all beliefs, unless you’re going to assert that *no* woman wears the burqa by choice, which seems pretty bold. I think we’re also looking at a pretty pronounced violation of the equality of religion; are we going to look at Christian nun’s habits? Is it just the veil that matters? It’s noteworthy that culture is not explicitly protected; I’m not sure if the authors made the common mistake of equating race with culture (hey, it was 1958) or made a more conscious decision; either way, trying to squeeze this into a cultural determinant with no religious component seems pretty sleazy.
We can find similar problems in Article 5.
In the United States, when evaluating laws that potentially run afoul of things like First Amendment protections, the courts use the Least Restrictive Means test: assuming the desired goal is valid (in this case, presumably, "liberating" women forced to wear the burqa, which I’d certainly agree is a valid goal), is the proposed law the least restrictive means of arriving at that goal? Yes, that’s US not French law, and I’m fluent enough with French constitutional law to know if they have anything equivalent, but the idea holds up well: faced with conflicting principles, are we doing the least damage to them possible?
I think it’s clear that in this case the answer is a resounding "no". The problem here is not the garment, it’s the culture of forced anonymity that frequently accompanies it. No woman should be forced to wear a burqa, but it’s the forcing, not the burqa, that’s the problem. A solution which targeted the correct half of the situation – the verb, not the noun – would be both less restrictive and more effective.
I have absolutely no objection to the idea that many women are forced into clothing and lifestyle choices against their will. But where are the restrictions on stilettos and minis? I’ve heard more men tell their partners something akin to "wear something tight" than "wear this bed sheet". Whereas the burqa can be (mis)used to anonymize, generalize, and neutralize a woman’s appearance and thus (arguably) a portion of her identity, the over-simplifying and hyper-sexualizing of her image caused by all manner of other fashion choices is no less damaging (arguably to herself and her peers).
Do you really want the state getting into those decisions?
Anthony: I thank you for the thoughtful and challenging comment. I hope it’s okay with you that I’ve brought it forward into a post, and that I’ll be responding to it in detail there.
I’ve just begun to write the post, however — It should be up in not too long a time.
[…] My July Fourth post on the burqa prompted thoughtful responses, one of which, from Anthony, I reproduce in full here, in order to try to respond to it in full. […]
Anthony is right. The French context matters a lot here. And that context goes back a lot further than 1958 and the constitution of the Fifth Republic. It goes back to 1789, which embedded cultural assimilation in the foundations of French republican citizenship. The Revolutionaries emancipated Jews, but on purely individualistic grounds and on the presumption that they would assimilate culturally. This is what Clermont-Tonnerre meant when he proposed in 1789 that "Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals." They could be citizens, if they gave up the things that marked them as a distinctive group and behaved like all other individuals in France–which meant eliminating not only Talmudic courts and schools, but also cultural practices like Hebrew or Yiddish, particular forms of dress, etc. (another supporter of Jewish rights went on to suggest that enfranchisement would be the best way of converting them to Christianity).
One could go on about the Revolution’s efforts to enforce cultural assimilation on everyone in France, by banning the use of regional patois languages, creating uniforms for all citizens, etc. etc., and (in the extreme version of the argument) sending those who wouldn’t conform to the guillotine. But the point is that this is what the "Equality" means in "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"–equal rights and equality before the law, but only between equal (i.e. culturally indistinct) citizens. So, culture is not only most certainly not protected by the French state, as Anthony points out, but in fact, it’s seen as a direct threat to republican equality. It’s deeply embedded in French political culture that cultural differences between citizens exist only in the private sphere and are tolerable, unless and until they impact public life.
Where to draw that line between private and public is the real problem. With some immigrants, the French state has been willing to assign cultural difference to the private (Italians and Poles in the 19th century; other Eastern Europeans since WWI). But these, of course, are white Catholics, whose differences were perceived as essentially linguistic and little different from those of French peasants whose regional languages could be eradicated with public schooling and mandatory military service in an army where all languages except French were banned. Church and State have been very militantly separated in France since 1905, but the secular Republic has always been presumed in very pernicious, unspoken ways to be white and Catholic. As long as the Church was no longer in control of public education, Catholicism could be said to be successfully "privatized" because its normative status made it invisible. (Privatized, that is, except in the case of women, who were presumed to be under the thumbs of their priests and thus weren’t allowed to vote until after WW2.)
I fear I’m rambling here, but my real point is that the politics of the burqa in France is embedded a much longer, local history. This local history is tangled up in other transnational, postcolonial processes, but can’t be reduced to those later processes and those transnational processes aren’t really the point of Sarkozy’s initiative here. He is very much speaking from and to that local politics. The argument he’s making now is precisely the one made against the enfranchisement of women in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century–non-normative religious beliefs are incompatible with the liberty necessary to citizenship. And this is roughly the argument that UD makes when she approvingly cites the Forbes piece about the apparently self-evident distinction between "civilization" and "barbarism" and when she argues the necessity of transparency for the proper functioning of the public sphere is the one made by the revolutionaries about cultural difference.
The French state has a long history of legislating the line between public and private, civilization and barbarism. These efforts have often have nasty consequences for the people affected (one school of thought follows this path straight down into the Terror), and those consequences have been nastiest for those whose cultural differences are defined by race and religion, as they are in the burqa debate.
On a more practical note, however you feel about the burqa, a legal ban is not going to solve the very real oppression of Muslim women in France. Make no mistake–this is a cynical and purely symbolic move by Sarkozy that has little or nothing to do with helping women who wear the burqa. He’s reaching out to far-right voters in the wake of their success in the European elections, and in the process making Muslim women his alibi for not doing anything about the larger forms of socio-economic racism and geographical isolation that encourage the growth of fundamentalist Islam in France.
Ellie: I appreciate that background, and I take your points that the particular history of France, going pretty far back, needs to be taken into account here, and that efforts to define and then enforce matters having to do with civilization and barbarism are very difficult and sometimes very dangerous.
I disagree, though, when you dismiss Sarkozy’s words as amounting only to “a cynical and purely symbolic move … that has little or nothing to do with helping women who wear the burqa. He’s reaching out to far-right voters in the wake of their success in the European elections, and in the process making Muslim women his alibi for not doing anything about the larger forms of socio-economic racism and geographical isolation that encourage the growth of fundamentalist Islam in France.”
Voters across the French spectrum, and certainly millions of voters on the left, AND indeed – given their strong statements of support – many Muslim voters – are delighted with Sarkozy’s words and strongly supportive of the idea of a ban. As far as one can tell, his words have the support of a vast majority of France’s citizens. So let us say that his speech — if you insist on seeing him as motivated by cynicism — is a cynical ploy to win the next election by a landslide.
I also disagree that a legal ban will do no good for oppressed Muslim women. I think it will do a lot of good – not only for oppressed Muslim women in France, but for such woman around the world.
No one claims that this sort of thing alone will undo centuries of reactionary woman-erasure. But high-profile gestures of this sort, in important countries, can have a strong impact on other countries, as women in those countries see what’s going on elsewhere.
More locally, forcing the men who put their women in shrouds to remove those shrouds, or to leave France for countries where they can keep the shrouds on, will have an obviously positive impact on oppressed women in France. They and their daughters will no longer have to wear the burqa. At least in public. Their ability to take part in the civic life of the French state will be immeasurably enhanced.
We may have to agree to disagree on Sarkozy’s motives, but I’ve become pretty convinced over the years that there’s very little sincerity in the man beyond what comes out when he lets down his guard and tells some poor citizen to "Bugger off." You’re right, though, that this has been a popular move. Anti-Muslim prejudice is an issue where the xenophobia of the far-right comes together with left-wing republican assimilationism, so perhaps "populist" would be a better way to describe this ploy. But still cynical.
Defending Muslim women from the predations of Islam (harems, polygyny, etc.) is such a long-standing trope in European imperialist rhetoric that it’s hard to hear someone like Sarkozy, who is willfully tone-deaf when it comes to French colonial history, recite it without suspicion. When framed as a question of the French president "liberating" oppressed women from their husbands, struggles over the burqa start to become a question of competing male privileges over women’s bodies, rather than of those women’s own freedom. And they highlight one of the grand ironies of the whole business, which is that veiling really spread in the Middle East in the nineteenth century, as a response to European cultural imperialism. Colonial states’ efforts to stamp out veiling transformed a relatively marginal practice into a politically and socially prestigious one and made it a defining feature of "Islamic" cultural identity.
In any case, my sense is that men who feel strongly enough to force "their" women to wear the burqa feel strongly enough about it not to change that part of the equation. If it’s illegal to wear the burqa in public, they will simply not allow those women out of the house. Or send them away to someplace the burqa is not illegal, which doesn’t seem like much of a gain for those particular women. This already happens with the ban on headscarves in public schools, where very strict fathers simply refuse to send daughters to school or send them to family outside of France. Oppressed women and girls will no longer have to wear the burqa, but their ability to take part in civic life will be entirely eliminated.
To clarify, I’m not defending the burqa. On feminist grounds, I agree with just about everything you have to say. But historically, when the French state starts to call certain traits incompatible with citizenship and civic life, people who won’t or can’t cede their cultural particularities end up excluded. If you accept that the state should be used as a tool for changing culture (which itself seems open to debate), the French Republic has been more effective in integrating people by drawing them into state institutions (schools, army, civil service) than by forbidding specific practices or behaviors. So if your goal is to help women, then don’t ban the burqa–reach out to women who wear it, invite them into public space, give them access to social services so they can gain the economic and social autonomy necessary to free themselves from the men who force (or brainwash) them to wear it. This is not a question of undoing centuries of woman-erasure, but of starting to redress one century of neglect and deliberate ghettoization of predominantly Muslim, "immigrant-origin" communities, whose culture and failure to integrate is then blamed for the social conditions in those communities.
July 5th, 2009 at 1:46PM
Hmm….this is not a picture of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, or a picture attached to any place, time, or context. Without such, the message is that the burqa alone, sans context, with no knowledge of who these women are or how they feel, stands for oppression and slavery.
I mention this because I just came across an article questioning such a simplistic understanding of the burqa:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/opinion/03iht-edsokol.html?_r=2&hpw
July 5th, 2009 at 2:44PM
Well, the piece you link to is about the most Orwellian piece of writing I’ve seen in some time, Dance. Its argument ends by claiming that the burqa symbolizes – or will, eventually, come to symbolize — a state’s commitment to diversity and equality.
Certainly no simplistic argument could go from the publicly confining, individuality-eviscerating reality of the burqa in democratic and non-democratic societies to a celebration of them as expressions of free non-conformity and individuality.
As horribly repressive regimes like France outlaw the burqa, he argues, the fully veiled woman will begin in more advanced countries to “exemplify a state that knows that its role is to promote equality, protect diversity…”
Both you and the op/ed writer refer to how the woman feels in and about her burqa as an important component of this issue. But the state — France, Turkey, whatever — need have no interest in her feelings and interpretations. These are in any case unavailable to us, since we can never know to what extent she feels coerced to say certain things. It certainly looks, however, as though she exists in a larger reality of oppression.
Which is another perplexing thing about the op/ed that you link to.
Did the writer not read the interview with the burqa-clad woman denied French citizenship? And with her husband? Her husband is desperate to leave France because it doesn’t know enough to cover its women. The woman is described by a number of observers as totally under the control of her husband and children.
In any case, she is a citizen of a state that stands for certain democratic principles, and that recognizes her erasure
(I’ll link to another NYT piece here —
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/opinion/03iht-edeltahawy.html
— a piece that clarifies the transnational reality of the burqa, and the in fact very clear ideology from which it emerges.)
— that recognizes her erasure as at fundamental odds with the democratic values of that state. The state, in other words, is under no compulsion to uncover the true feelings of every covered woman in its borders. It has a duty, rather, to understand its own founding principles, and to recognize and protect itself from gross insults to them.
July 6th, 2009 at 11:37PM
Agreed on the duty of the state. France’s action, however, does nothing to accomplish that goal. I’m not particularly persuaded by dueling NY Times op-ed pieces on the subject. Rather, I’d look to France’s own statements on what it stands for, and the effects of this policy on it, to determine how the current government is doing living up to the duty you correctly identify.
For starters, France’s motto is "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". This policy would seem in conflict with Liberty (as you’re removing the choice from the woman) and Equality (who else will be subject to similar attire-based restrictions?). Fraternity (as long as we forgive the implicitly gendered language) is trickier. It will probably be a net win (greater sense of inclusion in the surrounding society), but don’t discount the effects of isolating the woman in question from her existing local/familial/religious community.
Okay, let’s set the catchy motto aside and look for something a bit more substantial. The relevant sections from Article 1 of France’s current constitution, as revised, read:
"[France] shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs."
This seems a pretty clear violation of respecting all beliefs, unless you’re going to assert that *no* woman wears the burqa by choice, which seems pretty bold. I think we’re also looking at a pretty pronounced violation of the equality of religion; are we going to look at Christian nun’s habits? Is it just the veil that matters? It’s noteworthy that culture is not explicitly protected; I’m not sure if the authors made the common mistake of equating race with culture (hey, it was 1958) or made a more conscious decision; either way, trying to squeeze this into a cultural determinant with no religious component seems pretty sleazy.
We can find similar problems in Article 5.
In the United States, when evaluating laws that potentially run afoul of things like First Amendment protections, the courts use the Least Restrictive Means test: assuming the desired goal is valid (in this case, presumably, "liberating" women forced to wear the burqa, which I’d certainly agree is a valid goal), is the proposed law the least restrictive means of arriving at that goal? Yes, that’s US not French law, and I’m fluent enough with French constitutional law to know if they have anything equivalent, but the idea holds up well: faced with conflicting principles, are we doing the least damage to them possible?
I think it’s clear that in this case the answer is a resounding "no". The problem here is not the garment, it’s the culture of forced anonymity that frequently accompanies it. No woman should be forced to wear a burqa, but it’s the forcing, not the burqa, that’s the problem. A solution which targeted the correct half of the situation – the verb, not the noun – would be both less restrictive and more effective.
I have absolutely no objection to the idea that many women are forced into clothing and lifestyle choices against their will. But where are the restrictions on stilettos and minis? I’ve heard more men tell their partners something akin to "wear something tight" than "wear this bed sheet". Whereas the burqa can be (mis)used to anonymize, generalize, and neutralize a woman’s appearance and thus (arguably) a portion of her identity, the over-simplifying and hyper-sexualizing of her image caused by all manner of other fashion choices is no less damaging (arguably to herself and her peers).
Do you really want the state getting into those decisions?
July 7th, 2009 at 9:24AM
Anthony: I thank you for the thoughtful and challenging comment. I hope it’s okay with you that I’ve brought it forward into a post, and that I’ll be responding to it in detail there.
I’ve just begun to write the post, however — It should be up in not too long a time.
UD
July 7th, 2009 at 10:18AM
[…] My July Fourth post on the burqa prompted thoughtful responses, one of which, from Anthony, I reproduce in full here, in order to try to respond to it in full. […]
July 7th, 2009 at 12:15PM
Anthony is right. The French context matters a lot here. And that context goes back a lot further than 1958 and the constitution of the Fifth Republic. It goes back to 1789, which embedded cultural assimilation in the foundations of French republican citizenship. The Revolutionaries emancipated Jews, but on purely individualistic grounds and on the presumption that they would assimilate culturally. This is what Clermont-Tonnerre meant when he proposed in 1789 that "Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals." They could be citizens, if they gave up the things that marked them as a distinctive group and behaved like all other individuals in France–which meant eliminating not only Talmudic courts and schools, but also cultural practices like Hebrew or Yiddish, particular forms of dress, etc. (another supporter of Jewish rights went on to suggest that enfranchisement would be the best way of converting them to Christianity).
One could go on about the Revolution’s efforts to enforce cultural assimilation on everyone in France, by banning the use of regional patois languages, creating uniforms for all citizens, etc. etc., and (in the extreme version of the argument) sending those who wouldn’t conform to the guillotine. But the point is that this is what the "Equality" means in "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"–equal rights and equality before the law, but only between equal (i.e. culturally indistinct) citizens. So, culture is not only most certainly not protected by the French state, as Anthony points out, but in fact, it’s seen as a direct threat to republican equality. It’s deeply embedded in French political culture that cultural differences between citizens exist only in the private sphere and are tolerable, unless and until they impact public life.
Where to draw that line between private and public is the real problem. With some immigrants, the French state has been willing to assign cultural difference to the private (Italians and Poles in the 19th century; other Eastern Europeans since WWI). But these, of course, are white Catholics, whose differences were perceived as essentially linguistic and little different from those of French peasants whose regional languages could be eradicated with public schooling and mandatory military service in an army where all languages except French were banned. Church and State have been very militantly separated in France since 1905, but the secular Republic has always been presumed in very pernicious, unspoken ways to be white and Catholic. As long as the Church was no longer in control of public education, Catholicism could be said to be successfully "privatized" because its normative status made it invisible. (Privatized, that is, except in the case of women, who were presumed to be under the thumbs of their priests and thus weren’t allowed to vote until after WW2.)
I fear I’m rambling here, but my real point is that the politics of the burqa in France is embedded a much longer, local history. This local history is tangled up in other transnational, postcolonial processes, but can’t be reduced to those later processes and those transnational processes aren’t really the point of Sarkozy’s initiative here. He is very much speaking from and to that local politics. The argument he’s making now is precisely the one made against the enfranchisement of women in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century–non-normative religious beliefs are incompatible with the liberty necessary to citizenship. And this is roughly the argument that UD makes when she approvingly cites the Forbes piece about the apparently self-evident distinction between "civilization" and "barbarism" and when she argues the necessity of transparency for the proper functioning of the public sphere is the one made by the revolutionaries about cultural difference.
The French state has a long history of legislating the line between public and private, civilization and barbarism. These efforts have often have nasty consequences for the people affected (one school of thought follows this path straight down into the Terror), and those consequences have been nastiest for those whose cultural differences are defined by race and religion, as they are in the burqa debate.
On a more practical note, however you feel about the burqa, a legal ban is not going to solve the very real oppression of Muslim women in France. Make no mistake–this is a cynical and purely symbolic move by Sarkozy that has little or nothing to do with helping women who wear the burqa. He’s reaching out to far-right voters in the wake of their success in the European elections, and in the process making Muslim women his alibi for not doing anything about the larger forms of socio-economic racism and geographical isolation that encourage the growth of fundamentalist Islam in France.
July 7th, 2009 at 12:32PM
Ellie: I appreciate that background, and I take your points that the particular history of France, going pretty far back, needs to be taken into account here, and that efforts to define and then enforce matters having to do with civilization and barbarism are very difficult and sometimes very dangerous.
I disagree, though, when you dismiss Sarkozy’s words as amounting only to “a cynical and purely symbolic move … that has little or nothing to do with helping women who wear the burqa. He’s reaching out to far-right voters in the wake of their success in the European elections, and in the process making Muslim women his alibi for not doing anything about the larger forms of socio-economic racism and geographical isolation that encourage the growth of fundamentalist Islam in France.”
Voters across the French spectrum, and certainly millions of voters on the left, AND indeed – given their strong statements of support – many Muslim voters – are delighted with Sarkozy’s words and strongly supportive of the idea of a ban. As far as one can tell, his words have the support of a vast majority of France’s citizens. So let us say that his speech — if you insist on seeing him as motivated by cynicism — is a cynical ploy to win the next election by a landslide.
I also disagree that a legal ban will do no good for oppressed Muslim women. I think it will do a lot of good – not only for oppressed Muslim women in France, but for such woman around the world.
No one claims that this sort of thing alone will undo centuries of reactionary woman-erasure. But high-profile gestures of this sort, in important countries, can have a strong impact on other countries, as women in those countries see what’s going on elsewhere.
More locally, forcing the men who put their women in shrouds to remove those shrouds, or to leave France for countries where they can keep the shrouds on, will have an obviously positive impact on oppressed women in France. They and their daughters will no longer have to wear the burqa. At least in public. Their ability to take part in the civic life of the French state will be immeasurably enhanced.
July 7th, 2009 at 1:47PM
We may have to agree to disagree on Sarkozy’s motives, but I’ve become pretty convinced over the years that there’s very little sincerity in the man beyond what comes out when he lets down his guard and tells some poor citizen to "Bugger off." You’re right, though, that this has been a popular move. Anti-Muslim prejudice is an issue where the xenophobia of the far-right comes together with left-wing republican assimilationism, so perhaps "populist" would be a better way to describe this ploy. But still cynical.
Defending Muslim women from the predations of Islam (harems, polygyny, etc.) is such a long-standing trope in European imperialist rhetoric that it’s hard to hear someone like Sarkozy, who is willfully tone-deaf when it comes to French colonial history, recite it without suspicion. When framed as a question of the French president "liberating" oppressed women from their husbands, struggles over the burqa start to become a question of competing male privileges over women’s bodies, rather than of those women’s own freedom. And they highlight one of the grand ironies of the whole business, which is that veiling really spread in the Middle East in the nineteenth century, as a response to European cultural imperialism. Colonial states’ efforts to stamp out veiling transformed a relatively marginal practice into a politically and socially prestigious one and made it a defining feature of "Islamic" cultural identity.
In any case, my sense is that men who feel strongly enough to force "their" women to wear the burqa feel strongly enough about it not to change that part of the equation. If it’s illegal to wear the burqa in public, they will simply not allow those women out of the house. Or send them away to someplace the burqa is not illegal, which doesn’t seem like much of a gain for those particular women. This already happens with the ban on headscarves in public schools, where very strict fathers simply refuse to send daughters to school or send them to family outside of France. Oppressed women and girls will no longer have to wear the burqa, but their ability to take part in civic life will be entirely eliminated.
To clarify, I’m not defending the burqa. On feminist grounds, I agree with just about everything you have to say. But historically, when the French state starts to call certain traits incompatible with citizenship and civic life, people who won’t or can’t cede their cultural particularities end up excluded. If you accept that the state should be used as a tool for changing culture (which itself seems open to debate), the French Republic has been more effective in integrating people by drawing them into state institutions (schools, army, civil service) than by forbidding specific practices or behaviors. So if your goal is to help women, then don’t ban the burqa–reach out to women who wear it, invite them into public space, give them access to social services so they can gain the economic and social autonomy necessary to free themselves from the men who force (or brainwash) them to wear it. This is not a question of undoing centuries of woman-erasure, but of starting to redress one century of neglect and deliberate ghettoization of predominantly Muslim, "immigrant-origin" communities, whose culture and failure to integrate is then blamed for the social conditions in those communities.