Thank you, Ms. Useem, for your response. I greatly appreciate it, and I see the distinction you were making in the article. I suppose I took issue with the fact that I saw that distinction as being glossed over for the sake of rote social commentary.

To me, any discussion of the Hijab in a free society begs the question: how do free women who practice a form of veiling square their personal choice of expression with the fact that it is a tacit endorsement of an oppressive system?

I think there has been a lot of discussion on veiling, but this question gets tiptoed around. I think it is THE question for women who excercise that choice. I find the lack of examination of this issue somewhat dissapointing, because it tends to get replaced with talk about how "interesting" it is how women make these choices in this country. In my view, it should focus on how "complicated" or "contradictory" it is that they defend their doing so as a matter of choice; a concept that has been largely foreign to the institution of veiling for thousands of years.