While most western women might struggle to imagine any upsides to wearing a veil over their faces, a new study suggests that the hijab actually shields women from developing a negative body image.
The study, published in British Journal of Psychology, interviewed 587 Muslim women in the UK – of these 369 wore some sort of religious covering at some point and 218 women never used a hijab or veil.
The majority of the women, who ranged between 18 and 70, were unmarried and represented a wide range of ethinic groups including Bengali, Pakistani, Indian and Arabic and more than three quarters of them held an undergraduate degree.
Throughout the qualitative study the women were given several assessments to measure their frequency of hijab use, level of conservativeness, body image, attitudes toward the media and beauty ideals.
The results indicated that women who wore some form of hijab had a more positive body image than women who chose to wear only western dress.
For one of the tests subjects were asked to pick out an ideal body type from sketches of women’s bodies and the women who wore religious dress were more likely to select a body type similar to their own.
Study subjects who wore conservative coverings indicated they placed less emphasis on their looks and spent less time engaging in “appearance-management behaviours” than their liberal counterparts.
The Muslim women who wore western dress ranked higher on every level of body dissatisfaction and registered a higher levels of “social physique anxiety,” or concern with how others perceived their physical appearance. These women also were more likely to deem the media an “important source of information about being attractive.”
In their conclusions researchers suggested that it wasn’t just the women’s faith that was making them less susceptible to idealistic depictions of beauty.
“It might thus be concluded that use of the hijab offers Muslim women a small protective effect in terms of their body image … the use of the hijab may act as a buffer against negative body image,” wrote the authors.
“While we shouldn’t assume that wearing the hijab immunises Muslim women from negative body image, our results do suggest that wearing the hijab may help some women reject prescriptive beauty ideals,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Viren Swami of the Department of Psychology at University of Westminster.
While the veil might be considered by many as oppressive, it appears so too are unrealistic standards of beauty.
