A purdah

The use of the term "purdah" has sprung up recently in discussions surrounding the rules by which the Referendum on whether the UK will stay or leave the European Union.

It is a term which I remember in my reading of the Indian continent and the books written of British Colonial rule during the period of the Raj. 

The chaps were in Purdah, Mrs Hamilton-Blithe was in Purdah because of some indiscretion or other. It seemed a very colonial term associated with a class of people who had contrived a whole set of rules based on etiquette and not a little racism.

The term of course has much deeper roots. It's describes the social attempt to separate.

It describes the method of keeping women secluded from the eyes of strangers and is at the root of the veiling women from head to toe in the Burqa when away from their home and in some Hindu homes is a screen in the house dividing the woman's space from that of the male.

The Orthodox Jews use a screen to separate the sexes, a melehitzah curtain segregate men and women whilst they pray. Also in the Jewish tradition, the use of a wig to cover a married woman's hair so that only the husband sees his wife's real hair is another form of Purdah.

From the social Purdah to the religious Purdah we practice a form of Apartheid, segregation based on gender not on race but no less a segregation, practised by men over women. In our so called enlightened era of equality should we, as a Secular society not also ban this type of segregation as well. 

The French have imposed a ban on wearing the face covering vail in public places on the spurious basis of security but surely, as we bang on about equality of the sexes, this should be a corner stone in the feminist crusade. 

But wait. Just the other day a Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt was sacked from his long held position at University College London.  His crime was to joke at a conference of his peers "Three things happen when girls are in the lab - you fall in love with them and when you criticise them they cry".  This produced such an outcry amongst the feminists that he was chucked out of the University.

Perhaps the Hindus, the Muslims and the Jews, three old established communities linking their traditions back over Millennia have it right, there has to be a barrier, a purdah, a melehitzah screen between the gender differences, since together we do such great injustice !!