I agree with JugSouthgate: it's a question of personality. Just like everybody, people of genius may have -- or not have -- the kind of personality that goes well with marriage.

Leonhard Euler had thirteen children with his wife Katharina Gsell; if what I read isn't wrong, he wrote some of his mathematics papers while little children were running all around, sometimes playing on daddy's knees and trying to take the pen from his hand. He apparently had no problems concentrating; and, at any rate, he certainly had enough energy to father all those sons, despite his unbelievable creativity.

On the other hand, in my own field (linguistics), there's the case of J. P. Harrington, a famous descriptivist linguist to whom we owe tons of notes and data from various Californian languages, many nowadays extinct which would be totally unknown if it weren't for Harrigton. He was quite obsessed with his work, spent months and months, even years away from home, and often left his wife pretty much abandoned at home. As Leanne Hinton wrote in an article about him, being married to him didn't look like a good idea. His marriage was clearly more of a hindrance than of a life goal.

Would Euler have been happier and produced more work if he weren't married? Perhaps; but maybe he'd also have been depressed and ended up doing much less mathematics. Would Harrington? In his case, being single would probably have been better -- he could have collected more data instead of writing letters to his wife, who he apparently thought less often about than, say, Pomoan languages.

I think we all know people who looked worse after they got married, as well as people who looked better. A lot depends on the person's own personality, a lot on his/her parter's... It's the same thing with men of genious. Freud, so I've been told, actually quite loved his wife (by 19th-century standards) to whom he remained faithful his whole life, while Jung apparently didn't. It may be that people of great genius more often have the kind of obsessive personality that makes sharing a life with someone else more difficult -- more often than 'normal' people. So maybe this is statistically true. But I can also imagine that some people of genius actually derived more energy from their marriages -- they actually shone brighter because of them.

So basically: it all boils down to personality issues, and how frequent certain personalities are among people of genius.

In my recent conversations with Muslims, both men and women, it seemed to me that 'what the veil means' is not as clear as jebldmm above makes it sound. The issue is, to them, as complicated as the question of 'decency' is in Western Society.

There are many factors involved: marking oneself as belonging to a certain group (Moslims have as many groups as Christians, not simply Sunnites, Shiites and Wahabites...), marking opposition to other groups, marking a personal belief in a certain worldview... (I remember the Moslim woman who thought that Western women were dirty because they took baths in a bathtub -- 'with the water already dirty from her own body!' -- instead of a douche...)

The parallel of clothes is not bad. Don't Western clothes dehumanize people? After all, they cover their sexual organs, breasts and behinds, as if these areas were any less human than their faces, arms or legs. Doesn't this, in an by itself, dehumanize sex, making it 'dirty', 'something to be hidden'? Doesn't it destroy an important part of our individuality? Shouldn't we all fight against this oppression? Or at least those who feel that the veil is a dehumanizing factor?

But clothes, with all the signals they send -- fashion, belonging, having a certain profession, liking a certain style, being for or against certain issues -- are certainly much more than simply ways to cover one's shameful bodyparts.

I think the original article should have told us more about the woman in question -- her opinions, her views, the motivations for her decisions, and why she apparently didn't know she could vote. Also why she wanted to become a French citizen, and how French she would agree to become. I agree with jebldmm that we should not become citizens of a nation if we are not ready to learn about that nation, and that includes values, codes of behavior, rights, laws, etc. It may be, however, that the reason why she wants to wear the veil is ultimately compatible with French values. In which case it would no longer be a problem. Or it may be that this reason is not compatible with French values; and then, it would still be a problem.