Stephanie Cronin is a Lecturer in Iranian History at the University of Oxford, UK.
The book's most obvious common theme is the correspondence between the need to carve put a national character and the female body politic. Anti-veiling in these countries was an opposition to Arabisation; the veild came to be seen as a cultural import that was both alien and foreign in the modernising State. By comparison, even at the height of secular nationalism in the Arab world, Stephanie Cronin notes that there were no official attempts to change sartorial practices in any systematic way . The second theme that is pertinent throughout the book is the way in which suppositions about female dress can be contradictory. Face veils, cast as backward and submissive, wee in fact widely accepted and practised by elites in these countries prior to forceful unveiling reforms enacted during the 20th century . R.Khan , The Royal Society of Asian Affairs