Green Bay Handmaid strikes powerful image at protest

While her fellow protesters wave provocative signs, join in chants or whoop with every approving car horn, The Green Bay Handmaid prefers to make her point through silence and stillness.

And so she strikingly sits – cross-legged on the Walnut Street Bridge in Green Bay – encased in crimson robe and white bonnet, her voice symbolically stifled by a matching crimson mask wrapped tightly across her lower face.

The Independence Day rally against the Trump administration takes place on a cloudless day in the mid-eighties. The Handmaid’s robe – most likely rayon or polyester – appears to be impenetrable by the slight breeze coming off the river. 

That, says the woman who prefers to remain anonymous, is sort of the point.

“I put myself in a place of discomfort purposely to remind myself why we’re here,” she says. “I don’t want this to happen to our friends and our families and we’re on this path right now.”

The Green Bay Handmaid was on hand on Friday afternoon with her two young daughters, both under five years old. Occasionally she takes a break from her silent protest to hold them and speak to them. Otherwise a man she is with tends to them.

“I’m terrified of what’s to come for them,” she says and recounts her own history with fertility issues. “I had to have a medically necessary abortion. My baby’s heartbeat stopped. Now, if I was in a place like Alabama there’s no telling if I would even be alive at this point because the body of my baby didn’t want to leave my body. And without a medical intervention that means my second daughter wouldn’t be here either.”

While the Handmaid’s robe is a cultural signifier for the patriarchy and the turning back the clock on women’s rights, the woman on Friday wasn’t only protesting the Dobbs decision reversing abortion rights three years ago. She was also calling attention to what she sees as the current administration's depredations, from treatment of immigrants to violations of civil liberties. 

She admits that silence isn’t easy for her. She says when she’s not assuming the Handmaid’s role she’s pretty quick to crack back on those who speak out against her. And they do all the time, proving that her provocation is apparently effective.

“I had someone earlier today tell me to move to Pakistan,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve been told to leave the country if I don’t like it or told to come say stuff to people’s faces. I usually don’t respond though occasionally I will give the silent finger ... but very nonchalantly.”

As for enduring an hour or more in the heat with little ventilation to cool her body, the Green Bay Handmaid says she was trying to honor those being held in horrible conditions.

“Yeah, I’m definitely sweating buckets,” she says. “But I mean, they (immigrants forcibly deported to prisons in other countries) don’t have air conditioning there. They are forced to sit in horrible, painful positions for hours – hours, if not days, being beaten and not able to sleep.

“And, you know, how can anybody …? I’m so angry about all of this.” 

The Green Bay Handmaid says she started protesting when she participated in The Slut Walk in Chicago in 2013, a protest meant to draw attention to rape culture and the double victimization of sexual assault victims who must also endure intimations by the authorities that they are somehow responsible.

She says the discomfort is well worth the charge she gets out of exercising her right to express her anger – silently but powerfully.

“I think there’s a lot of things we can do,” she says. “And this is one of those things. This is my way of being able to put it all out there. I don’t know, if it gets attention, that’s what we want. The attention here needs to be on how horrible these things that are happening.”