A woman planning a protest in Boston this upcoming weekend in favor of allowing women to go topless in public has compared her fight to Rosa Parks’s effort to integrate public buses in Alabama in the 1950s.
Katrina Brees, founder of a group called Equaltitty, plans to lead a protest on Boston Common on Saturday, August 17 calling for the state to allow women to go topless in public without criminal penalty. During the protest, Brees says she plans to be shirtless but will cover her nipples with stickers depicting male nipples, according to NOLA.com.
Brees toldThe Boston Globe in an interview about the event that she thinks women should have the same right to go topless in public as men, drawing a parallel between this fight and Rosa Parks.
“Rosa Parks on the bus wasn’t about the bus, but about discrimination and oppression, and so is this,” she told the Globe.
Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was a civil rights activist in Montgomery, Alabama who refused to give up her bus seat to a white person in 1955 and was arrested because of it, sparking a bus boycott by civil rights protesters.
The topless rally on Boston Common is scheduled for 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday. Protesters plan to meet at the MLK Embrace statue on the Boston Common, according to a Facebook post from Brees.
Here is what Brees wrote about the event in another Facebook post:
Please join me in Boston! All top levels welcomed. All genders welcome. I really do need supporters to come out and help me make this happen. If you’re up there and have kids, I recommend you bring them to see how history is made. We plan to obey the police if needed and will be passively walking the perimeter of the park. Oppression is oppression. Whether it is gender based top discrimination or arm bands to designate certain groups, clothing has always been used to identify the oppressed and control them. We can not give one more inch over to the oppression of our bodies. If you want to figure out how to join me and make that happen smoothly and have a great time, please just private message me and we can discuss the plan.
Nazis who controlled Poland forced Jews to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David during the late 1930s and early 1940s, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Currently, exposure of female breasts in certain circumstances constitutes Open and Gross Lewdness and Lascivious Behavior in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, according to Chapter 272 Section 16 of the state’s general laws; it carries a prison sentence of up to three years.
It is not clear whether the law has been enforced in recent years.
Only one municipality in Massachusetts allows women to legally be topless in public: Nantucket. The town’s voters approved the measure at Town Meeting in May 2022. However, that rule is limited to beaches.
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