France’s established and very well known feminist groups did not accept scarf-wearing women in their meetings.
They decided early on these women could not be feminist, indeed must be against everything that feminism stands for, that the hijab was a symbol of oppression. It has taken the few of us who are opposed to this discriminatory law to start discussing whether high heels, lipstick and multiple signals of femininity might just as well be labelled symbols of oppression.
This contempt is ironic: it is assumed these women wear a scarf as they are forced to do so by their menfolk, and that the solution to that undue influence is to expel them from school and send them back to the same oppressive families. If French feminists saw scarf-wearing Muslims as oppressed women, it should be a reason not to expel them from school or to curtail their movements, but to actually embrace them. Across the country, Muslim women are not seen as “real” French.