My grandmother, in a Hasidic household in Warsaw Poland at the turn of
the last century, had all the hair shaved off her head the night before
her wedding. Her younger sisters, who had begun to turn away from
orthodox traditions, gathered outside the room where the deed was being
done and called through the door, in vain, for her not to let them do it.
Shaving a woman's head when she marries is, I presume, a somewhat more
drastic way of achieving the same goal as the related tradition of
requiring women to wear headscarves: preventing the arousal of sexual
interest in men. But it is a less drastic means of achieving that goal
than a host of other religious traditions (or cultural traditions formed
against the backdrop of religion), like requiring women to cover
themselves more or less completely when they venture outside or
consigning them to the back rooms of their homes when male guests visit.
Men are everywhere challenged by their sexual attraction to women--an
impulse that threatens their autonomy and gives women the potential to
harm or even, Delilah-like, to destroy them. I believe this accounts for
the notion of witches: This power is so great, its source must be
supernatural.
Women are the often-unwitting vessels of such power, though sometimes
they wield it intentionally through their dress, speech, makeup, and
body language. (I suspect it is intentional rather less often and less
consciously than men may think.) If men look to religion to guide them
in living right sorts of lives, it seems likely, if not inevitable, that
they will seek to manage their own and other men's sexual drives by
managing the appearance and behavior of women.
At the same time, when men accrue power, they often use it to, among
other things, act on their sexual impulses. It’s the other side of the
same coin, and it takes a particularly pernicious form when religious
gurus, especially cult leaders who cut their followers off from outside
connections, incorporate sexual access to female followers into the
religious systems they devise.
If the ways in which religious communities try to regulate women’s behavior and appearance are becoming more benign in many places but more extreme in others (and women’s own responses to these efforts vary greatly, some resisting or even rebelling whereas others embrace them), the temptation for some men in positions of authority to use their power to gain sexual access to women seems to have continued unabated.
My grandmother soon regretted having shaved her head, and she let her
hair grow back, but she remained orthodox throughout her life. I don’t
know what she would have made of the rabbi who married my husband and
me; at least one uncle didn’t approve. I am told he muttered audibly
throughout the ceremony, "That’s no rabbi!" That the 5-foot-tall woman
performing our ceremony was indeed a rabbi is evidence of the astounding
changes in women’s relation to religion that have occurred in the
century since similar prayers were spoken at my grandmother’s wedding
Deborah Tannen is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and author of the internationally best-selling books, 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation' and 'You're Wearing THAT? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.'
