A new look for women’s rights protests: ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ cloaks and bonnets
Two by two, they ascend capitol steps to overlook Senate galleries in eerie silence. In their contrasting blood-red cloaks and stark white bonnets, the women look like they might have stepped out of history.
Borrowing from the imagery of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a Hulu TV series that started in April, activists dressed as handmaids are providing perverse optics at demonstrations for women’s rights at state houses across the country. Quiet and demure, they mimic the women forced to bear children for a childless elite in a theocratic dystopia envisioned by Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book, which returned to the bestseller list after the bruising gender wars of the 2016 election.
“That’s why it’s such a perfect visual for this — because you see these women who are completely hidden,” said coordinator Emily Morgan, a 33-year-old mother who lives in Milford, N.H. “That is how they would have us, if they could, really and truly.”
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