Fascinating story! I re-read Matthew Stadler's gorgeous but heartbreaking "Landscape: Memory" the other day while coping with a power outage. Set between 1914 and 1916 in San Francisco, the protagonist (a young man) describes swimming with his first, daring topless swimsuit while describing the voluminous robes his suffragist mother had to endure if she wanted to enjoy the water.

As I was reading I thought about (as I'm thinking now) of all the many hot summer days I've spent swimming at the lovely little beach on Detroit's Belle Isle. I thought about how almost every day I was there, I would see families where men and boys wore ordinary swimsuits playing or excercising in the water – while the women and girls in the families draped themselves head to toe in voluminous robes. They didn't swim, they couldn't. At best they would wade in up to their waists to escape the heat.

Yes, in the United States in the 21st century. Why? Religion, of course. In this case, Islam.

I should point out that I went to the beach sometimes with two Muslim women friends, courageous women who refused to cover their heads in public and who insisted that they would wear modern swimsuits on the beach. Many of their male family members reacted to both practices with shock and intense anger. But my women friends refused to be oppressed.

Of course, one of them was a university professor and the other a pharmacist who owned her own business. They had the power and independence to do as they pleased.

Not so the poor women and girls on the beach who were covered with black robes, making sandwiches for the men and boys of their families who frolicked and played in the water.