Sunday, May 29, 2022

Women in Revolt

Walking through San Francisco's Civic Center a couple of Saturdays ago, we stumbled across a Womens March protesting the imminent rollback of abortion rights...
...by the new, radical right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The homemade signage of the marchers was on target...
...and unashamed in its abortion advocacy.
We marched down Market Street with the crowd...
...trapping the occasional, amused motorist.
In the bizarrely prophetic 1985 Margaret Atwood novel, The Handmaid's Tale, various kinds of feminist criminals are strung up in the public square, including gay men who are labeled "Gender Traitors."
At the corner of Fourth and Market, a Christian evangelical preacher was holding forth on a microphone and speaker about how demons had taken over these women and that's why they were so angry.
Fundamentalist religion has a lot to answer for in this country and in the world, principally its centuries-old wars on women.
The 1928 Alice Neel painting above, Well Baby Clinic, of an indigents' maternity ward in New York where Neel gave birth to her first child, is a gruesome depiction of the past that patriarchal reactionaries want to bring back. We cannot let that happen.

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