Liz Walker: Women have fought for freedom... now we should show we respect ourselves

I felt so shocked at my reaction that I had to sit in the car for a minute or two before going home. There are very few people in Muslim dress round here but still, I couldn’t work out why I minded.

I’m a liberal soul, do what you want to do, be who you want to be, but this was somehow different. Personal. She wasn’t a victim of the Taliban, she was one of us. But seeing this on my home turf I felt as if I’d suddenly been confronted with a slave, in full manacles, with bleeding stripes across his back. It just wasn’t right.

I’ve been unpicking my thinking ever since. At the crux I believe, absolutely, that women are nobody’s subjects. We are born free and we should stay free, able to feel the sun on our faces, the wind in our hair.

Nothing is so grievous as seeing little girls swathed in fabric, denied the God-given pleasure of this world that should be the right of every child, whatever its sex, whatever its nationality, whatever its religion.

When that child grows up, she should never be told to imprison herself still more, to deny herself exercise and freedom, to live life at one remove.

I am too British ever to be so rude as to say anything to someone dressed in a niqab. Besides, if the woman I saw last week had told me she liked wearing the thing, that it was her choice, her protection against the terrible iniquities of our society, I think I would have cried. When you can get the prisoners to lock their own cells you really have got it made.

But what I would have liked to say to her is that in Britain women have fought long and hard to be the people we are today.

A scant 200 years ago, marriage meant having nothing of your own. Forty years ago, it was impossible to buy a house without a male guarantor. There are people alive today who remember when women didn’t have the vote. As long as the men in your life looked on you kindly all was well, but the moment they turned you were in trouble.

Today things are different, but we are already going backwards. Bullying women back into obscurity is a bloodsport that always has appeal. I can remember watching Moroccan women dump their veils on the ferry over to Spain. They don’t do that any more. They’re too scared. I will not stand by and watch restrictions encroaching here once again.

But we, the western women, are not blameless. Have a look at Rihanna on MTV. Talk about sexualisation of a popular art form, it’s like training your children in prostitution. Sadly, when Muslims first came to Britain they lived in the poorest areas of our country, where standards were at their lowest.

They were confronted with a sexual morality that had nothing to recommend it, the flowering of which is the horrific exploitation of young girls by a minority of Asian men. Respectable British life does not happen in town centres on a Saturday night, nor outside Huddersfield takeaways, or on porn sites.

The majority of us, with our restraint and our sexual continence, are invisible to Muslims. They see only half-dressed drunken girls, unprotected by their families, out there to be used and abused. No wonder they reach for the tent.

The human race is far from rational. Women cause men to lose control and if you start covering up one sexual trigger – hair for instance – the focus moves on to another and then another. Ankles. Faces. Hands. Thus you get the tent. But we have to accept that sexual triggers exist. Breasts and crotches are always going to be arousing and it is irresponsible for women to flaunt either and expect to get away unscathed.

I was a Samaritan for some years. It’s a great organisation, but I came to the conclusion that if you talk sympathetically to any man for long enough his thoughts will turn to sex.

The less inhibited were positively frightening. I would drive home at night, looking at half-dressed girls on their way 
out, and think that if they knew what was going on in the heads 
of the men I’d been talking to they’d have gone straight home 
to change.

But young girls don’t know. 
They are trusting and optimistic. As you get older, you realise 
the words “You are not going 
out in that, young lady!” had 
their point.

I am free and I intend to 
remain so. But if my granddaughters are to have that freedom too, we have to stand up for the middle way. Neither repressed nor flaunting ourselves. Keeping sex special and meaningful. Proving through our behaviour that free women can respect themselves and demand respect from others.

We, the daughters of women who knew what it was to be 
less than men, must stand up for the rights of women in this country. And to that woman buying stationery last week, I 
just say this – your dress affects others. Step out of your tent and into the sunshine.