Marginalization Of Women In The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood

The definition of marginalize according to google is to “treat (a person, group, or concept) as insignificant or peripheral.” I suppose it’d be too cliche to say this but the group that was marginalized the most in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, was Women. Interestingly enough this group is marginalized in the same way that women today are marginalized. After Gilead turned into the oppressive society that it became, suddenly women no longer were seen as human beings. They were seen as figures that were based on the value of their bodies. But does this really differ from the way that women are currently valued and treated in today's society? In both worlds, both fictional and real, women are valued on what they have to offer men. Today,

This is how the women in the story were silenced. By taking away how they speak to each other and giving them only a handful of phrases as a means to communicate, you take away their ability to think for themselves. In “The Handmaid’s Tale”, there are many classes of women, groups like; handmaids, marthas, econowives, etc. Each group of women are silenced, excluded, and marginalized in many ways that are unique to each other. Marthas for example, are women who were forced into the roles of the maid, handmaids are the women who were forced to give up the right to their bodies for the act of reproduction, wives were the compliant women who lived to be obedient partners to their husbands while econowives were the women who had every role combined into one. When you put it into writing, it sounds like a harsh reality. But if you closely examine it, the roles that the women of Gilead take on, these are the type of roles that the wives of the western world are expected to take on. American women, once they get married, are expected to birth children, they are expected to cook and maintain the cleanliness of the home, be compassionate forgiving partners, all while being physically attractive on top of

Gilead can be seen as a hyperbolized version of today’s western world The way that I see it, we are currently halfway there to a society resemblant to Gilead. History shows that it only takes a single event to set off a cataclysmic series of events, like how WW1 was started because of the assassination of archduke francis ferdinand. In the Handmaid’s tale, everything started to go downhill, and Gilead was started after the president was assassinated and congress was gunned down. I’ve mentioned earlier that even in today’s society women are seen as inferior objects. They are seen as lesser counterparts in the home, in the workplace, etc. So if women are already regarded so lowly in our current society, what's to stop them from being regarded even lower later. What will stop the men from deciding that it’s time to strip all rights from women. With the way that women are already being treated, I’d say that it would only take one large event to set that kind of societal transformation in motion. Hopefully, that won’t happen for a long long