Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy

Egyptian feminists, drawing sustenance from the real women who led the struggles I had read about. I looked for them everywhere I could. Many of the older women practically adopted me, inviting me to their meetings, sending me their latest reports, and alerting me of important conferences they were holding. One of those mentors, Hala Shukrallah, became the first woman to lead a political party in Egypt when the social-democratic Dostour Party elected her its head in 2014.
    One day, I interviewed a veteran journalist who was doing exactly what I aspired to do: using her writing to fight for women’s equality.
    “Why are you covering your hair?” she asked me.
    For Shukrallah and the other feminists from the New Woman Foundation, my hijab had not been an issue. So when this journalist brought up my headscarf, she blindsided me. I wasn’t there to talk about myself, but I became Exhibit A as she explained the conservative forces at work against Egyptian women.
    “Can’t you see you’re destroying everything we’ve worked so hard for?” she asked me.
    At the time, I could not. I was such an enthusiastic self-identified feminist, and the thought that I was letting the sisters down horrified me.
    “But I’ve
chosen
to dress like this,” I replied.
    That word choice again.
    What finally helped me part ways with the hijab was an anecdote my mother relayed from a conversation about me she’d had with a physician who was a coworker of my father’s. It helped put to rest my conflict over that word,
choice.
The physician, asking after my brother and me, wondered if I was married. When my mother told him I wasn’t, he replied—as she conveyed to me—”Don’t worry, she wears a headscarf. She’ll find a husband.”
    Just like that, a piece of cloth had superseded me.
    Then I understood—as this man’s patronizing confidence in my scarf had shown—that I wasn’t the Hijab Poster Girl I thought I was. I was just a hijab.
    When I so quickly replied, “But I’ve
chosen
to dress like this,” I had not considered men, such as that physician, for whom my choice was irrelevant (just as my choice was irrelevant to the journalist). I realized that the journalist and the physician were on opposite sides of a struggle, and I knew that I did not want to be on the physician’s side.
    The week I finally decided to stop wearing a headscarf,I had just finished my graduate studies in journalism at the American University in Cairo. You could count on maybe two hands the number of women in headscarves at AUC during the time I studied there, from 1988 to 1992. In those years, I was in the headscarf-wearing minority off campus as well.
    My two biggest challenges on the day I parted ways with my headscarf were, first, telling my family, who had pressured me to keep it on during those eight years of struggle; and second, getting a bad haircut. I did not want anyone to think I’d taken off my headscarf for vanity’s sake or to attract men. My feminism at the time meant I did not wear any makeup, did not pluck my eyebrows, and rejected “femininity” with a passion (except for skirts and color-coordinated headscarves).
    So the last thing I wanted was to “look good” after I took off my hijab, and the best way to guarantee that was to go to a female hairdresser. In Egypt, at least before the majority of women donned the hijab, hairdressing was considered a profession of ill repute for women, and was dominated by men. So I went to a local hairdresser and asked for a woman. They asked if I was sure, but I was adamant.
    Wonky haircut secured, and wearing my headscarf just halfway up my head, I went to pick up my sister from school, where I knew my mother would join me. As we waited for the girls and boys to dash out, I told my mother nervously what I’d done.
    Those final days of my struggle with the headscarf took place during a heat wave, and I used the weather as an excuse to hide at home for a few days, putting off the delivery of