Prof. Susan Whitney is an associate professor of history at Carleton University, where she served as an associate dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences for five years. She teaches European, youth, and women’s and gender history, and is the author of Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Duke University Press).
Below is an excerpt of her review of Sex and Secularism by Joan Wallach Scott for the Literary Review of Canada entitled “Is secularism really better for women? Sex, niqabs, and the secular state“:
In October 2017, Quebec’s National Assembly passed legislation prohibiting women from receiving public services while wearing a niqab, which covers the wearer’s face. Muslim women were among those who objected. Saima Sajid said to Globe and Mail reporter Ingrid Peritz, “If you choose to wear a bikini, why can’t I cover myself?” These contrasting approaches to women’s bodies and sexuality lie at the heart of gender historian Joan Wallach Scott’s probing and intentionally provocative new book, Sex and Secularism.
Sex and Secularism is the tenth title to appear in Princeton University Press’s Public Square series, which aims to “showcase some of the world’s finest public intellectuals writing on topics at the forefront of political discourse.” Other series authors, especially Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore and University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum, will likely be better known to LRC readers. But the internationally renowned Scott has arguably had more influence within the academy. Yale’s Joanne Meyerowitz called Scott’s pioneering 1986 article “Gender: a useful category of historical analysis” a “foundational text” of women’s and gender history. “Gender” continues to appear on syllabi across North America, and to be used and cited by scholars across the globe. Scott’s five subsequent single-authored books have been translated into eleven languages and she has received honourary degrees from universities around the world, including Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Concordia, Université du Québec à Montréal, and the University of Bergen in Norway. France made Scott a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 2017.
The seeds of Sex and Secularism were planted in The Politics of the Veil (2007), Scott’s first Public Square book. Turning her critical feminist historical eye to the heated debates around the headscarf then raging in France, home to western Europe’s largest Muslim population, Scott asked how it was that one article of Muslim women’s clothing—the veil, as the headscarf became known in France—could be endowed with such symbolic significance in French political life. How could a 2004 ban on the wearing of “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation in public schools, a term that included large crosses and skullcaps but targeted headscarves, become such an important plank in the French response to the political uncertainties and violence of the post-9/11 world?