An army of uniformed women this week invaded the halls of the Philip A. Hart, the Senate building where Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings were held. They were dressed as if they had run away from a 17th century Puritan village. It is not the first time that women use these costumes to demonstrate and defend their reproductive rights. This is the story behind that peculiar election.By:: Angélica Gallón S.,8 Sep 2018 – 08:21 AM EDTShareWomen dressed as the maids from the Hulu series 'The Handmaid's Tale' this week in the Senate. Credit: Getty Images

The elevator doors opened and an entourage of women came out from inside, all dressed in red robes that reached to their feet. Their lowered heads revealed white caps that, in addition to hiding their hair, shielded their eyes and made them look almost identical, unrecognizable. The women began to walk through the halls of the Philip A. Hart, the Senate office building in Washington, where Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh had arrived early. It was Tuesday, September 4, the first of four days, for his confirmation hearing.

As if it were a trained army, in silence, the women in the red robes arranged themselves in space in orderly rows . They settled down the corridor. They arranged themselves on the stairs. His mere presence, his silence, seemed to be his great gesture of protest against the man who, if elected as the new member of the Supreme Court, could forever change the freedoms that women in the United States have preserved for decades over their bodies.

But what hidden meaning was communicated by those hermetic clothes chosen by the protesters?

It was not the first time that bewildered police and law enforcement officers had to deal with the strange army of unarmed women who looked like they had come from a 17th century Puritan village. The same mass of bodies dressed in identical red gowns and nuns' hats had been seen in the month of March 2017, in the marches that were organized in front of the Capitol building in Texas to protest against the bill SB 415 of the National Committee of the Right to Life, which would limit abortion procedures in the state.

Who inspired all those women to dress like this? What led them to massively choose the same aesthetic?

The same scarlet militia, perhaps larger in size, had displayed its silence during the Cyber ​​Security Gathering, held almost a year later, on July 31, 2018, outside the Department of Homeland Security.

It even appeared in Argentina, in the month of August, in the 'Parque de la Memoria', while inside Congress the senators decided whether or not to legalize abortion and Costa Rica and Ireland also reported their own outbreaks.

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Why were all those women of such different ages, races and backgrounds in the past and those who had come to the Brett Kavanaugh hearing protesting dressed in red and in robes?

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The Army of the Handmaids

The red dress that all these protesters, mothers, students, professionals, rights activists have adopted in recent years for their peaceful protests is, in fact, a kind of costume, one that exactly recreates the clothing worn by women of the Hulu series 'The Handmaid's Tale' (its original English title is 'The Handmaid's Tale'), inspired by the novel of the same name written in 1984 and published a year later by Margaret Atwood.

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In the novel, the population is shrinking due to environmental problems, and the ability to have healthy babies has become "a rare commodity." The United States, its Constitution and its Congress have ceased to exist and are all under the power of the rulers of the Republic of Gilead, a fearsome regime that manages to recruit the few remaining fertile women and assign them to its political leaders at will. way of maids, hence the name of the novel and the series.

Although more than conventional servants they are sex slaves, raped by their masters, with their mistresses' permission and in their presence, every time the maids are ovulating, with the sole purpose of conceiving a baby. Pleasure is totally forbidden, even between wives.

This fictitious nation, which despite not being real, draws from many human tragedies narrated by history in different nations, has a biblical passage at the base of its political ideology: that of Jacob, his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two servants. One man, four women, 12 children, a world anchored in the past and in religion in which servants cannot claim their children.

Despite the fact that this story has been circulating for almost four decades not only as a novel, but as a film and even as a play, it was really the coincidence with the rise to power of President Donald Trump, his clear animosity towards women and his relaunch as a new super series produced by Hulu, which made Margaret Atwood's maids stop being characters in a narrative and become real women of flesh and blood who, by dressing in public as these maids, tell the world that they fear that with the new directions that the United States is taking, something similar may happen to them in the future.

After all and, as the author of the book herself said in an essay written in The New York Times, "The Republic of Gilaead is based on the Puritan roots of the seventeenth century that have always existed under the America that we thought we knew. These Puritan roots are familiar to us, even today, and it's part of what makes Gilead so horrible."

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The power of a red robe

The modest and shocking outfits worn by the women in the protests against Brett Kavanaugh, who in his statements has even used the term "abortifacient drugs" to refer to contraceptive methods, are the same ones worn by the oppressed of Gilead who derive from the western religious iconography.

“The maids wear robes like virgins, the red refers to the blood of childbirth, but also to Mary Magdalene herself . In addition, red has a strategic value, it is easier to see if someone tries to flee,” Lauren Boumaroun, PhD from the UCLA School of Film and Media Studies, explains to Univision News, who assures that this costume has become universal because the problems women face are universal.

“The oppression of women and the surveillance of their bodies is not just a problem in the United States, in fact it is much worse in some other countries. Wearing this costume has become synonymous with a basic concept: oppression .”

Already in real history, not only in Atwood's fiction, many totalitarianisms have used clothes to identify and control people. “Yellow stars and striped pajamas for the Jews, for example, because with the assignment of a dress the creation of heretics becomes much easier”, adds Boumaroun.

That women dress up to show their rulers their voice of protest is not a completely new mechanism either. On March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated, 8,000 women marched for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. “Many were dressed as 'Columbia,' the female personification of America, and staged a performance in front of the Treasury Building in Washington DC. At that time, the costume had another invocation, that the nation was also allowed to be built with the ideas and opinions of women” , explains Boumaron in an interview with Univision.

Margaret Atwood could not anticipate that all this political burden would be put on the clothes she had created to dress her characters, nor could she foresee that her story written in 1984 would gain such relevance decades later, as she herself has explained in multiple interviews, she "only wrote one book." However, the fear that his invented women experience seems to share the same scarlet color as the fear that many women have today in the United States that access to abortion in this country is on the line and with it on the line the possibility of remain owners of their bodies and their reproductive freedoms.

As women dressed as maids waited outside Brett Kavanaugh's hearing, inside, Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris asked him: Can you think of any legislation that would give the government a say in a man's body? She was not wearing any red robes, but she was one of that same army.

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