Other Pressures on Women

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/opinion/other-pressures-on-women.html

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To the Editor:

Re “What’s a French Liberal to Do?” (April 14): As a longtime U.S. feminist journalist now resident in Paris, I see a missing element in the arguments against the hijab and the burqa that Sylvie Kauffmann presents in her article. Mayor Anne Hidalgo of Paris finds “modest fashion a little upsetting,” yet she has never spoken out against high heels. The pressure on women to wear them may be more subtle than the pressure on Muslim women to cover themselves, but it is equally effective.

Now France proposes to ban the hijab in universities. Yet unlike the hijab and the burqa, high heels actually damage women physically. The American Osteopathic Association has called them “the perfect storm for permanent health problems,” including “overworked or injured leg muscles, osteoarthritis of the knee, plantar fasciitis and low back pain.”

So why the silence about heels, Ms. Hidalgo and others? Perhaps here, as in many ways in which the West sees Islam, the mote in another’s eye looms larger than the one in our own?

JUDITH MAHONEY PASTERNAK

Paris