RODNEY HIDE: The Strange New Face of Women’s Empowerment
- Administrator
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Here is a single image that captures the extent to which we are lost.
Khadija Patel stands at the Palace of Westminster, recipient of the
British Citizen Award 2026 for her “work empowering young women.” She
is covered from head to toe. Only her eyes are visible. The official
caption celebrates her as a champion of female empowerment.
I am a child of the 1960s. That was the decade when Western women were
discarding the restrictive symbols of the past. They demanded equal
legal rights, equal access to education and work, and the freedom to
move through the public square without concealment or apology. The
bra-burning image, however exaggerated, stood for a rejection of
imposed modesty codes and a claim on full personhood in the open air
of a free society. No one then imagined that, half a century later,
the same society’s institutions would honour a woman whose public
presentation is the deliberate erasure of her face and form — and call
it empowerment.
There is nothing inherently wrong with voluntary religious dress.
Adults in a free country may cover themselves as they choose. The
problem is the official language and the organised applause.
“Empowering young women” once meant expanding options: more education,
more economic independence, more physical freedom, more say in one’s
own destiny. When the same phrase is attached to a figure whose
appearance signals the opposite — the concealment of the female body
from public view — the words have been emptied of meaning.
Up is down. Down is up. We have lost the ability to speak clearly and
bluntly. In losing that, we have lost the capacity to debate and to
learn. We have lost confidence in our own history and in the
principles we once died defending.
The Palace of Westminster is the seat of a society that claims
equality between the sexes and the right of every individual to be
seen and heard as a full citizen. Celebrating a presentation that
removes a woman from visual equality with men is not a minor cultural
detail. It is a revolutionary symbol that what we once stood for is no
longer defended.
Western liberalism once insisted that women should not be defined by
the male gaze or by traditional restrictions on their visibility.
Today, that same culture treats full covering as a progressive choice
to be protected and praised, while any criticism is branded bigotry.
The result is selective blindness. We have #MeToo and gender-pay
debates, yet we struggle to say plainly that covering a girl or woman
so that only her eyes remain is not a neutral fashion statement. It is
a social signal about segregation, modesty rules, and the proper place
of women in the public realm.
The 1960s generation fought for women to be seen. The present
generation of institutional gatekeepers are teaching the next
generation of girls that invisibility is a form of strength. That is
not progress. It is a retreat dressed up as tolerance.
That same 1960s tolerance nurtured the idea that we must be tolerant
even of intolerance. Sir Karl Popper foresaw the exact danger. Writing
*The Open Society and Its Enemies* in Christchurch during the Second
World War, he observed in a footnote:
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If
we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we
are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of
the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance
with them.”
Our anything-goes ultra-tolerance has led us here. It has spawned its
own form of intolerance — an intolerance of the open face, the equal
presence, the unapologetic visibility of women in the public square.
We are losing the open society not primarily from external assault,
but from within, through our own refusal to name what is happening and
to defend the very freedoms that made the 1960s liberation possible.
A free society does not need to police private dress. It does need to
keep its language honest and its institutions coherent. When
“empowerment” comes to mean the celebration of comprehensive female
concealment at the heart of parliamentary democracy, the word has been
turned inside out. The 1960s generation fought for women to be seen.
That seem tolerant generation is teaching their granddaughters that
being unseen is a virtue.
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT Party leader
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