I wrote this before the 2024 US election. I hoped for another result, but did not hide from the alternative. I think it’s still relevant to the world in which we find ourselves now.

Dear Friends, Gilead, no balm

Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

Jeremiah, 8:22

from all of us, thank you Margaret Atwood

I first read The Handmaid’s Tale shortly after it came out, and, as so many others, I was stunned by the visceral power of its deadly vision. I’m not opposed to “dystopian” fiction, but often it invites the reader into a complicity with the dystopia. Not a single word of

The Handmaid’s Tale does this, not one, ever. So here we were, steeling ourselves for the second half of the 1980s, eyes on the horizon searching for something that was not Thatcher or Reagan … and here it is! Something else, something even worse! And not just worse, but we can see how Reagan and Thatcher are preparing the road to the Republic of Gilead. Thanks a lot, Margaret! For me, and I think for many other people, The Handmaid’s Tale was transforming. By that time we knew at least something of the depths of misogyny in our society; we knew that Thatcher and Reagan (using their names to stand for the whole) aimed to erase even the modest gains achieved by feminism. But we were sure that they could not stop the movement towards liberation. Delay it? Yes, even turn it back a step or two. But the movement would go on. The Handmaid’s Tale did not tell us that we were dreaming about all that, but it gave us, and out of the blue a sudden, electrifying knowledge of all that was at stake: Reagan and Thatcher were far from the worst that we might face. Yes, they might try to take us back to the 1950s, maybe they might even succeed in getting us back to say 1972, for a while …

The stark possibility of the Republic of Gilead was daunting. But once acknowledged, it was … not invigorating, but clarifying: it focused attention by showing the worst. But not a dreamed up worst, a dystopian opposite to utopian socialism, rather a worst founded in the realities of modern society, in which the most advanced elements conspired with the nightmare weight of the past: I am still haunted by the role played by credit cards and automated banking, in their infancy in 1985, in, at a stroke, annihilating women’s economic independence.

So, at the time, the late 1980s, we were put on our guard: this is really not an idle fantasy, it is a real and possible trajectory; but the aim towards Gilead was masked by the wonders of the free market. Yes, we needed to defend against it but the main opponent lay elsewhere.

All that is changed now. I wonder, do aging free market warriors, trickle-down theorists long, as I sometimes do, for the old days? Look at today: members of Congress routinely have conversations with God as to their chances at becoming Speaker of the House, or whether they should switch from a congressional district in which it really looks like they’re going to lose, to one that may be safer. They tell us specific things – actual sentences – that God said to them. Is it just me? Am I wrong? This is not only bizarre, but terrifying – not to mention really seriously creepy: come on guys, couldn’t you talk to God about something just a little more, what? It doesn’t have to be the doctrine of the Trinity, or do You agree with the Nicene Creed? But, at least, something that has some bearing on explaining, even if not accounting for … and we are certainly not expecting you to ask Him to justify his ways to man [sic], but you are talking to God, for God’s sake. When you’re sitting down with God, isn’t there something more important to talk about than the latest polls in your current district as opposed to the district you dumped because the polls were so bad?

Anyway, the Republican Party got religion. Why? Well, demography’s against us, we gotta get more votes! We need an issue … how about this: abortion. Yes, it’s never been a big deal for most denominations – the Southern Baptists are fine with it – but what if we drum up a grievance, you know, like the “tax revolt”, man, that was wild! Beyond our wildest dreams!

And the anti-abortion movement has been the same, the operatives who planned it – notably Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell, and Richard Viguerie – could hardly have imagined how successful they would be.

What is so terrifying now is not only the regressive character of these utterances, some of them merely comical – God explaining to an aspirant to the Speakership of the House that he needs to pace himself, wait for the moment – but others recovering the brutal violence at the heart of Christianity in its historical development. So many modern Christian movements have sought to negate this violence, to make love truly its center, message and mission. But a core element of fundamentalist evangelical churches, aligning themselves with the reactionary Republican MAGA movement have claimed violence as Christianity’s savior. But …

… what is so terrifying is how normal all their utterances have become. A state legislator proclaims that she would rather that her daughter should commit suicide than transition to male. A pastor condemns Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, because although she claims that women are inferior to men, there she is in Congress rather than barefoot in the kitchen. Laws in many states – Idaho is in the news right now because its laws are before the Supreme Court – require that a woman with a wanted pregnancy, but suffering some life threatening defect must prove, in effect, that she will die without an abortion, and she can only do this by being close to death.

A bill introduced in the Texas legislature (Texas House Bill 2889) in 2023 would lower property taxes for married couples depending on how many children they have. Couples with ten children would pay no property tax at all. Of course, divorce nullifies the deal, and no adoptions: the (undivorced) wife must give birth to ten children by the same father, her husband. As far as I can tell, the bill has not been ratified, and I’m not sure of its current status. But it has received much praise from Texan reactionaries.

If a couple, or a woman, want ten children then they, or she, should go for it. The standard medical advice is that someone should not become pregnant again for at least two years after having a child. Ten children, ten pregnancies, ten births. I’ve tried to do the math, I’m very bad at it, but I come up with at least twenty-eight (28) years. For at least 28 years, a woman who has ten children will have been pregnant, giving birth, raising small children. Pregnancy and childbirth put an enormous, a unique strain on the human body. One who is heading towards ten children will quite normally be caring for young children while pregnant.

If a woman is going to have ten children, willingly, then she must be willing to spend something like thirty years from normal child-bearing age even to the point where her youngest is an infant.

If a woman wants to have ten children, and understands what that will mean for her body and for her life, then who’s to argue? She is not alone in choosing a physically grueling way of life. Ballet dancers and football players also choose such a life, although the physical demand on their bodies is not as great, and their careers are typically far less than a third of the time that she will spend pregnant, giving birth, and child-rearing. Another comparison is

with physically debilitating forms of labour: coal-mining, but also working in an Amazon shipping warehouse. The comparison is closer first, because the time lived as mother of ten is closer to the coal-miner’s or the warehouse-worker’s working life – decades, not years. Second, to say that the miner or the warehouse worker chose their employment by their own will and nothing else is libertarian gaslighting, counting on Americans’ refusal to recognize the class basis of American society. How many mothers of ten children actually chose, by their own will, to bear them? I haven’t yet pulled up the statistics, but I suspect that today, in the US, the number of families with ten children all born of the same mother and by the same father, is quite small. I would also guess that the number of women who wish to give birth to ten children is small.

The state of Texas, if Texas House Bill 2889 passes, would proclaim that Texas measures women by the number of their children (and, of course, on their morality: no divorce, no adoption), and the more children the more worthy the woman. To proclaim the superiority of women with ten children is to rule that women belong at home, that they can have no necessary place in the public sphere, economic or political.

Texas, among other states, is advancing legislation that will subject women driving across the state line to “inspection”, what inspection? A pregnancy test. Law that forces a woman to be as close to death as possible before she can receive standard medical treatment is the most barbaric result of the overturning of Roe v Wade. Perhaps the most vivid reminders of the Republic of Gilead are the Texas ten child law and the laws to monitor women’s travel.

All of these things are happening today, but they are not exactly new. They are the current manifestations of the oldest human struggle, that of the domination of men over women … but that opposition is not, as Hegel would say, unmediated.

In the 1980s we could take Margaret Atwood’s warning as a real possibility but one among equally serious dangers, and against which we were sufficiently forewarned. Today her warning has become an imminent danger that is already being realized here and there by individuals, but also by state authorities. The danger that comes from what has always and continues to be the core of domination, the domination of women by men, has expanded to all forms of domination.

There is no balm in Gilead.

Love and solidarity,

Bobby