Organizers of the Women’s March asked this year’s rally attendees to refrain from wearing The Handmaid’s Tale-themed outfits — not because the narrative such costumes push is false, but because it’s too white.
According to the organizers, the popular television show on which the outfits are based focuses too much on white women. As a result, the handmaid garb, a red dress and cloak with a white bonnet, “erases the fact that black women, undocumented women, incarcerated women, poor women, and disabled women have always had their reproductive freedom controlled in this country,” the group says on its website. “This is not a dystopian past or future.”
Radical feminists have donned handmaid outfits several times over the past few years in an attempt to link the pro-life movement to the dystopian fiction depicted in Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, in which the women of Gilead are suppressed, and fertile women, in particular, are forced to bear children against their will. Apparently, the Women’s March believes that our society (where abortion is legal and a majority of voters want to keep it that way, albeit with restrictions) is even worse than Gilead’s — for minorities, that is.
The Women’s March organizers are just as absurd as the women who think that The Handmaid’s Tale costumes make a good point. Abortion rights advocates’ use of the book’s imagery is nonsensical, but it’s not racist. It’s almost as if the Women’s March is trying to lose support — even from activists on its side.
But, to its credit, at least the Women’s March had the guts to use the word “women.” Or maybe they forgot that that’s offensive nowadays too.
