Women In The Handmaid's Tale

In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood, the author offers a futuristic dystopia that explores the concept of the overt subjugation and marginalization of the status of women. The setting of the novel takes place in a republic based theocracy referred to as the Republic of Gilead. The majority of the population is rendered sterile as the result of chemical and nuclear pollution. The narrator, Offred, forcibly takes on the role as a Handmaid, who serves the purpose of reproducing in order to equalize the current population. The social structure of Gilead implements a male-dominated prerogative that is designed to keep women under radicalized oppressive restrictions. The totalitarian regime reduces women as usable commodities and forces them to cower under the notion of women inferiority and objectification. The psychological pressures of conforming to the restrictions of Gilead begin to result in the majority of the women acquiring high levels of internalized misogyny. This paper will examine the women characters in The Handmaid’s Tale, who have passively accepted the oppressive agenda of Gilead. The psychological damage carried out by

In “The Rebel, The Lady and the ‘Anti’: Femininity, Anti-Feminism, and the Victorian Woman Writer”, author Ann Heilmann, explores the boundaries between feminist and anti-feminist agendas and women’s role in this movement. The Anti-Feminist and Anti-Suffrage movements of the 1920’s argued that women demanding equality and political stance will only cause detrimental effects on the order of the society and the roles within the domestic home. Many anti-suffrage movement protesters argued against female independence and made no position of desiring any sort of equality against their male