My Message on IWD is 'Stay Vigilant'

I wonder what your first thought is when I tell you that International Women’s Day is on March 8th? Great interest? Moderate interest or complete indifference? I must admit that my first reaction every year probably hovers around mild indifference. Why? Because for many years now I have felt a degree of detachment from the whole subject of women’s rights. 

We have come a long way in the UK from the time when women had to leave their employment when they married or needed their husband’s or father’s permission to open a bank account (1975), and I feel a great degree of autonomy as a woman who has been able to control her own fertility, work outside the home, borrow money to get a mortgage, buy and sell properties and start a business without anyone raising an eyebrow.

However, for the first time in fifty years, I have noticed with alarm the ways in which some of those taken-for-granted rights are under enormous threat in various ways in different parts of the world. 

I’m going to approach this via the medium of dystopian fiction. Specifically Margaret Attwood’s amazingly prescient novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which I first read when it was published in 1985. Attwood (a Canadian) had obviously looked at the Women’s Movement and all the legislative and attitudinal changes it had wrought for women’s rights throughout the 60s and 70s, and concluded that at some point in the future there would be a backlash. It may have taken forty years but for the first time I feel that her predicted backlash is starting to gather pace. 

When the book first appeared in the mid 80s, I was just finishing a four year degree course as a mature student and was on the brink of getting my first ‘proper’ job, aged 38. And four years later, having gained complete financial independence for the first time, I got divorced after twenty years of marriage. Since then I have been able to make choices and control my life in a way that would have been unthinkable in the past (even within my lifetime). And for that freedom I have to thank the Women’s Movement of the 60s and 70s, which was led both in the UK and the USA by some remarkable and brave women. 

But that was forty years ago and it is interesting that The Handmaid’s Tale has come back into our consciousness in 2017 via a television adaptation starring Elizabeth Moss as Offred, the Handmaid of the Tale. So, what future backlash was Attwood’s 80s story warning us about? It may be helpful if I summarise the plot and then join up some of the dots that have formed in my head (and maybe yours too!)

The book, set in New England in the near future, posits a Christian fundamentalist theocratic regime governed exclusively by men in the former United States (now called Gilead) which came to power as a response to a fertility crisis. Offred’s back story is that she is a young married professional woman called June Osbourne with a small child. Alarmed by the closure of abortion clinics and the curtailing of a woman’s reproductive rights, June goes onto the streets with other like minded women to protest. Gradually the governing regime enacts ever more draconian laws which end the rights of all women in Gilead to self determination. June is arrested trying to escape to Canada and her daughter is taken from her.

The book vividly portrays a female-repressive society which is immensely shocking to our modern sensibilities. All women are entirely confined to the domestic sphere under the total control of their male counterparts, the most powerful of whom are the Commanders. As fertility is an issue, women of child-bearing years like June are given a special status as ‘Handmaidens’. They are assigned to Commanders, in June’s case Fred Waterford and his (barren) wife Serena, and are then given new names to show that their body now belongs to the Commander. So June becomes Offred and is forced to have sex with Fred every month in a semi-public and semi religious ‘ceremony’ in the house where she lives with the Waterfords and the female servants who are called ‘Marthas’.

All control and draconian punishment in Gilead is administered in the name of a very vengeful God. Fear permeates the lives of all the women, even the wives, whose only role, regardless of any skill, training or education they may possess, is to create a pleasant, peaceful home and to anticipate the role of mother if the longed-for child appears via the handmaiden impregnated by her husband. All women, whatever their status, wear ‘modest’ dress as a form of uniform and when they leave the house, Handmaidens are forced to wear all-enveloping long red cloaks and huge white hooded bonnets which restrict both their vision and the gaze of outsiders. One other feature of Gilead is that women and girls are prohibited from being educated or from reading any books other than the Bible, on pain of physical mutilation.

Clearly, a young woman like June, steeped in the tradition of the rights and freedoms she has enjoyed as a strong, well educated and independent wife and mother in the past, is going to find the oppressive system in Gilead completely intolerable. However, the authority that denies those rights and freedoms is concentrated in the hands of a few all powerful men and underpinned by a religious fundamentalism which excuses all their most vicious acts. June does her best to subvert the system, but it is ultimately futile and Attwood’s message in the book is stark: As a woman you may win rights - but such hard-won rights will always be vulnerable to attack from vested interests, and what has been gained can also be utterly lost.

Just five years after the TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale was first aired, Roe v Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court in June 2022. This was the reversal of a right granted in 1973 at the federal level to all women to seek an abortion up to the point of foetal viability of around 24 weeks. The Court turned over the power to regulate abortion - or ban it outright - to individual states. As a result, millions of women lost the right to have abortions and many fewer have been performed. Although women can travel to states which still allow abortions, there is now a call in some places for this right to travel to procure an abortion to be restricted or banned. 

Reproductive rights are fundamental to all the rights that women enjoy, so this feels like the canary in the coal mine. Of course, whilst democracy prevails, there may be an electoral backlash from all those women (and men) whose lives are being negatively impacted by the reversal of Roe v Wade, and I will watch with interest what happens during this election year in the US.

So on International Women’s Day when we celebrate women the world over, I invite you to join with me in thinking of and acknowledging all those women who live in any way that resembles the life that Offred was forced to lead in The Handmaid’s Tale: 

Any female who is denied education because of her sex. 

Any woman who wears clothing which conceals her head, face or body but not from choice. 

Any woman who cannot leave the house without a male guardian to accompany her. 

Any woman who has been told who she will marry and with whom she will bear children against her will. 

Any girl or young woman who is denied sex education or access to contraception. 

Any woman who has become pregnant and who is denied the right to terminate that pregnancy when that is the right decision for her life. 

And finally, any woman who lives under the fear of coercion or any form of physical threat from any man or men in her life.

To all of those Offreds I say: I fervently hope that one day you may gain or regain the rights currently denied to you so that you may live happily as strong, confident and independent women. And to all the rest of you I say: “Stay vigilant because, in Joni Mitchell’s memorable lyric, “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone”.

Happy International Women’s Day Everyone!

Tricia x

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