Were Women at Neil Gorsuch’s Hearing Sending a Message or Were Their Outfits a Coincidence?

Some Twitter users noticed an interesting wardrobe choice made by the women surrounding Judge Neil Gorsuch during his confirmation hearing on March 22: They wore white.

White outfits on women have a long history, tracing back to the suffragettes, and recently the garb has been utilized as a sort of shorthand by female Democrats to show their resistance to the policies and ideology of President Trump and his administration.

During Trump’s address to Congress last month, Democratic women in the House of Representatives all dressed in white — a move that yielded some inappropriate comments from Republican men.

During her campaign for the presidency, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wore white to accept her party’s nomination and for the third and final presidential debate. Then she wore it again to Trump’s inauguration in January.

One of the most notable of the women in white behind Gorusch was his wife, Louise, who has appeared in white at other public appearances with her husband — and Twitter users were calling into question her continued choice of the now very political color.

But the women in white seated behind Gorsuch weren’t the only ones making a fashion statement in the political arena this week.

On Monday, women entered the Senate chambers of the Texas House of Representatives dressed in the red cloaks and white bonnets synonymous with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to protest a pair of extreme anti-choice bills being voted on that day. One, Senate Bill 415, would ban the procedure known as dilation and evacuation, or D&E — the most common second-trimester abortion procedure and one frequently used following miscarriages.

D&E is considered to be the medically safest way to perform second-trimester abortions. The other proposal, Senate Bill 25, would prevent patients from suing their physician if their child is born with disabilities, even if the physician discovered any kind of abnormalities in a fetus during pregnancy. Supporters of the bill say it is intended to prevent discrimination against those with disabilities and unfair lawsuits against medical providers, but opponents of the bill take serious issue, saying it would make it legal for physicians to lie to their patients.

The reference to The Handmaid’s Tale, organized by members of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, was a spot-on choice by the silent protesters who took to Texas’s Capitol: The novel tells the story of a fundamentalist Christian group overthrowing the U.S. government and replacing it was a theocracy that immediately moves to eliminate women’s rights. In the book, a certain group of women are designated as “handmaids,” or women whose sole purpose is to serve as reproductive bodies for the new dictatorship’s ruling class. And these handmaids are forced to dress in heavy red cloaks — just as the women in Texas did on March 20.

Sometimes a picture really is worth 1,000 words.

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