While lurking around Orthodox Williamsburg, I saw large groups of Hasidic men or Hasidic boys. I would see one woman, on the street or on a subway platform, in her shapeless long skirt and her orthopedic shoes, and I wondered if the reason I saw her at all was because she had dibs on the wig that morning.

The shared use of both the housedress by old French matrons and the wig by young Hasidic women keeps the riot potential down, making it so that these women have to emerge single file, or rather, one at a time.

If I witness an army of women in housedresses occupying town squares or breaking shopwindows with their rolling pins, I will know I was wrong, and I’ll be amused to have been wrong, but those are scenes I have yet to see.