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Tuesday
For the second day in a row I report on a timely article that grounds itself in an obscure 19th century poem. Thom Hartmann of Substack’s Hartmann Report cites John Greenleaf Whittier’s “How the Women Went from Dover” to highlight the GOP’s plans for American women should it regain the presidency. The plans are as chilling as the poem.
Hartmann points out that the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” along with rulings and opinions by Trump-appointed Federal District Judge Michael Kacsmaryk and rightwing Supreme Court justices, all point to attempts to reestablish control over women. As he puts it, they “have some very specific plans for nationally resetting the legal status of half the American population, and they’re using religion and ‘sin’ to justify their bizarre imposition of 18th century values”:
They explicitly want to reverse the status of women’s legal, workplace, marital, and social equality and return to a time when biblical law dictated that men ran everything from the household to business to governance and law.
Among ideas that have been mentioned are enforcing the Comstock Act, which was originally passed to prohibit shipping conveying obscene matter, crime-inciting matter, or certain abortion-related matters through the U.S. system. While generally considered defunct, it’s still on the books and Alito and Thomas on the Supreme Court have mentioned it approvingly. Through it, Hartmann says, Republicans “will be able to ban the shipment of anything, from drugs to surgical devices, that can be used to produce an abortion. This could even end most hospital-based abortions by essentially outlawing the equipment needed to perform them.”
Also in the Right’s targets is no fault divorce, which has been a boon to women in abusive marriages. And the drug mifepristone, used in early abortions. And abortions generally, of course. As Hartmann bitterly notes,
Like people who love the death penalty (and in two states now state legislators have called for the death penalty for women who get abortions), they want to be able to torture them and watch them suffer; they want them to experience humiliation, and feel mortification for their sin of rejecting a pregnancy initiated by a man who was ordained by their god to be their master and the head of their household.
In the eyes of Trump judge Kacsmaryk, “so-called marriage equality” has put America “on a road to potential tyranny” and reflects a “complete abuse of rule of law principles.” Elsewhere, Hartmann notes, the judge has complained that the sexual revolution
ushered in a world where an individual is “an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology” and where “marriage, sexuality, gender identity and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”
And then there’s Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, perhaps the GOP’s next vice-presidential candidate, making the case that women would be happier if they were more willing to tolerate domestic violence:
One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace [is the idea that] these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.
All of which leads Hartmann to conclude, as he transitions to Whittier’s poem, that “torturing women for religious reasons is nothing new for American theological zealots.”
“How the Women Went from Dover” is based on a real life incident in 1662 in which three Quakers—Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose—so enraged Dover’s Congregational Church that the minister and the church elder lobbied the crown magistrate to have them punished. The three women were stripped naked, tied to the back of a horse-drawn cart by their wrists, and then dragged through town while receiving ten lashes each. Whittier writes:
The tale is one of an evil time,
When souls were fettered and thought was crime,
And heresy’s whisper above its breath
Meant shameful scouring and bonds and death!
Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip
And keener sting of the constable’s whip,
The blood that followed each hissing blow
Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.
Apparently it wasn’t enough for the women to be whipped in Dover so the reverend got the punishment extended to 11 nearby towns, spread over a distance of 80 miles of snow-covered roads. The next whipping occurred in Hampton:
Once more the torturing whip was swung,
Once more keen lashes the bare flesh stung.
“Oh, spare! they are bleeding!” a little maid cried,
And covered her face the sight to hide.
After that, however, the horror of the spectacle caused a general revolt as local authorities refused to carry out the order.
With shame in his eye and wrath on his lip
The Salisbury constable dropped his whip.
“This warrant means murder foul and red;
Cursed is he who serves it,” he said.
“Show me the order, and meanwhile strike
A blow at your peril!” said Justice Pike.
Of all the rulers the land possessed,
Wisest and boldest was he and best.
He scoffed at witchcraft; the priest he met
As man meets man; his feet he set
Beyond his dark age, standing upright,
Soul-free, with his face to the morning light.
Looking back at the incident, Whittier reflects,
The tale is one of an evil time,
When souls were fettered and thought was crime,
And heresy’s whisper above its breath
Meant shameful scourging and bonds and death!
Then he reassures today’s women that, if their lives are better, it’s because of women such as these:
How much thy beautiful life may owe
To her faith and courage thou canst not know,
Nor how from the paths of thy calm retreat
She smoothed the thorns with her bleeding feet.
One can only pray that the thorns have been smoothed. Put the GOP back in power and who knows where we’ll end up? When Justice Alito defended the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade, he cited a witch-hanging judge from the 18th century, but why settle for turning the clock back to the 1700s when you could turn it back to the 1600s?
