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The Handmaid’s March, which took part in the demonstration against the legal reforms and religious coercion in the past weeks in front of the Knesset in Jerusalem, at the initiative of the members of the “Building an Alternative” organization, is probably one of the main images that will be etched in the public memory from this period of time. The dozens of women who marched with a low look, wrapped in red costumes as a tribute to the dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood, are a painful reminder but also a warning light that nothing is obvious, and that the long struggle for equal rights for women is far from over.
The current government in Israel openly declares its intention to roll back women’s rights a hundred years: to exclude women from the public sphere and from decision-making positions and direct them to fulfill their “natural role” as household managers and those who are destined to bear children.1 The novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, and the series inspired by it, seemingly place the events outside the range of possibilities that come to mind at the present time. It seems unthinkable to expropriate a woman’s body and turn it into a kind of living incubator that stores babies raised by women higher than her in status who cannot give birth. It seems unthinkable to ban women from reading and writing. We have wandered far from the time when women did not have the right to vote. We won, at least it seemed to us that we won, this struggle. And here is a government whose statements bring us back, in the blink of an eye, to what we thought we had left behind.
But beyond the obvious warning light – what the “Handmaid’s March” represents to me, is the endless circularity of human existence and human development. Naturally, we would like to think of humanity as developing linearly: the present is built on the past (and on the mistakes of the past), and the future is built on the present. In fact, linearity also carries within it an illusory dimension. T