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By Root 440 0

our small hotel to the Louvre and sat enjoying the park and gardens that stretch away from the museum. People from all over the world strolled around, played games, rode bicycles, and licked ice cream cones. It was a bright, muggy July day, and most people were wearing shorts and T-shirts. Amidst this cacophonous microcosm of Western life, a man walked past us in clothing that would not have caused anyone to think twice: fine jeans, a white shirt. He was carrying a nice camera. Slightly behind him walked a woman in a burqa, clad head to toe in black veil. We could see no part of her skin. The sight of the woman, hidden as she was behind dark folds, was jarring to me and even more to my wife. It was difficult not to stare. The burqa seemed more like a sign of oppression than religious expression. To my wife and me, the woman clad completely in black cloth, sliding along behind her Abercrombie-dressed husband on a hot summer day, certainly did not appear to embody the potential of human agency and choice.

We are not the only ones to have had this reaction. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, addressing a joint session of the French Parliament a few weeks before, had argued that the burqa should be banned outside the home: “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.” He said that “the burqa is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement.” The French parliament later voted to ban the burqa in public spaces.3

Of course we in the West have our own gender norms and assumptions, many of which are enforced by cultural rules about styles of dress. If “dress is code,”4 then Western culture is hardly immune to discomfort at the hands of people who defy the dominant code. For example, in many public schools around the United States, girls are banned from dressing like boys, and vice versa. Ceara Sturgis, a senior at a Mississippi public school, found herself barred from the school’s yearbook after she sat for her photo in a tuxedo rather than the open-necked drape that other girls were wearing. In Marion County, Florida, students are required to dress “in keeping with their gender.” A more troubling example comes from Oxnard, California, where Lawrence King, an eighth-grader who occasionally wore gender-bending outfits and makeup, was shot to death in 2008 by another student while in class.5

We also have our own religious fundamentalists of various stripes who enforce strict gender norms in part by requiring women to dress extremely modestly: consider the Amish, some branches of the Mennonites, or the traditional garb of Catholic nuns. The Christian Bible does say that “the head of the woman is man” and “every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head . . . A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”6 The current Pope, when he was still a cardinal in 2004, wrote a Vatican document “urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating ‘feminine values’ like ‘listening.’”7

2.

One of the most powerful ways culture influences us is by telling us what our roles are, and how we may behave in those roles.

My father began his career as a minister in 1956, when he became the pastor of the Sugar Creek Baptist Church. He was nineteen and a freshman in college. The church, located on a long stretch of road outside Princeton, Kentucky, was surrounded by fields planted with sweet corn. It was small, with only forty-four members, making it a perfect place for my father to begin his work. The church folk took him under their wing, encouraging him, praying for him, and feeding him expansive Sunday dinners of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and black-eyed peas.

Soon after my dad began his work at Sugar Creek, he met my mom at college. They fell in love and my dad proposed. Receiving