Redrawing pictures of women from the past to make them look more modest is precisely what religious fundamentalists do now.
This is what the Trump administration has done to these pictures of women from the American Revolutionary period. The fashion 250 years ago was for a woman to expose a lot of her chest, but now that's considered immodest, so the pictures have been redrawn. It is a fundamentalist impulse.
Here is an article about the Orthodox Jewish community doing this with photographs of Orthodox girls from summer camps in the 1940s to make the sleeves longer.
The fundamentalist mindset is: We are only doing what has always been done. We represent a return to tradition. We have never changed. The world has changed, But we have remained steadfast to the old ways. And it's all lies. It’s always lies. There is no such thing as a group that is in no way influenced or changed by the world around them. They give themselves spurious authority for their acts of control of women and of everyone else this way.
My CNN colleague and I spent the last week trying to figure out what was going on with the Freedom250 portrait gallery which features a bunch of founding fathers striking LinkedIn CEO poses. We figured they were AI-generated but no one from the org would confirm it so we sent the images to our photo team to take a look. They analyzed the…