martingale:

How can you claim that the head coverings are not religious?

There are large populations of autochtonous, christian Europeans where older women wear headdress. See kcurie's comments upthread about rural Spain 50 years ago (and you can see the same things in the Balkans and in the Mediterranean - I bet you a fair fraction of Bulgarian, Greek, Sicilian rural grandmothers dress in black and cover their heads still today.

A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds; a man of deeds and not of words is like a garden full of turds — Anonymous