This is a cautionary tale.

My mom was a great seamstress. For my wedding day, she helped me create a simple, long, white velvet gown. She made herself a lovely gold and white brocade dress. It was a simple, sleeveless, empire style and came exactly to the knee. My wedding dress has hung untouched in my closet for close to 60 years. But many people in our family have worn that brocade dress, most recently our oldest granddaughter. She wanted it for a school dance, but thought the zipper was stuck and might need to be replaced.

I took the dress to the wonderful woman at Desabrais, who patiently fixed the problem with just a piece of wax and a few stitches to prevent the zipper from opening too far. While she worked, I shared the story of my mother’s dress with a couple of other customers, two folks I’ve known for many years.

The short form goes something like this:

This is the dress my mother made to wear to my wedding. Later she gave it to me to wear for fancy events. My daughter wore it as she started her music career. She even wrote a song about the dress. Later, my niece wore it as a college student, and now my granddaughter is hoping to wear it to a gathering this weekend. Clearly the dress has suited many situations and people.

As I kept thinking about the dress’s history, I remembered the events, cultures, and political situations it has lived through. When my mom first stitched it, only married women in the U.S. had legal access to birth control. No woman in our country had legal access to abortion. Women and girls with limited means sometimes resorted to dangerous and potentially deadly ways to avoid birthing a child they knew they could not support. Or they struggled to raise a baby without any help from the father or the community. Women and girls from families with greater means, often left the country. They were the lucky ones who could exercise some control over their own bodies and make choices about education, careers, and the size and shape of their families.

By the time I was wearing the dress, young women were joining consciousness-raising groups, demanding (even more loudly than our mothers had) a level of control over our own bodies and our own lives. “Our Bodies Ourselves” by the Boston Women’s Health Collective was the guidebook for many in my generation, and the legal victories were inspiring. By 1972 all women and men in America had legal access to birth control, and in 1973, the landmark Roe v. Wade case was decided by the Supreme Court. Finally, it seemed that women were being given equal rights in the health care arena with men.

By the time my daughter was wearing the dress she was singing “This is just to tell you that I wear your dress sometimes,” her song which ends,

And my body by the letter of the law is still my own

When I lay down in the darkness

Unburdened and alone

With the liberty you’ve given

Like the clothing you’ve outgrown

To your granddaughter.

Women of her generation were able to take for granted that decisions about their bodies really were their own.

Then came 2022. Our granddaughter, because she lives in Vermont, will still be able to make her own choices as she comes of age, thanks to the foresight and work of legislators like Ruth Hardy, Kesha Ram Hinsdale, and Becca Balint. However, my niece, who lives in Texas, can no longer make these kinds of decisions. Her choices are controlled by a government that neither respects nor values women.

Reviewing the dress’s history, I realized the perils of taking our rights and freedoms for granted. Our granddaughter’s favorite Broadway play is Suffs, the story of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. That struggle ended with women gaining the right to vote in 1920. It is a right that I have taken for granted all my life. Yet as I watch the rights of other groups and individuals getting systematically eroded, I wonder what will be taken away next. And will my mother’s dress endure to see the rebirth of kindness and caring in our country?

Cheryl Mitchell is president of Treleven, a retreat and learning program located on her family’s sheep farm in Addison County. She does freelance consulting on issues related to children, families, social policy and farm to community work. She can be reached at [email protected].