This book has been banned in many schools - about controlling women's reproduction (and all else)
Last edited Tue Apr 3, 2012, 04:02 PM - Edit history (1)
Years ago when I first read The Handmaid's Tale, I couldn't put it down. I had to read the whole thing, then re-read it to make sure I'd absorbed everything. I couldn't believe it. I had had misgivings about many Republican ideas floating about at that time, and which unfortunately are still around, like flotsam, stinking up our country:
1) The idea that women belonged in the home, that women choosing their destiny was destroying the country.
2) Watching certain women proclaim that the women's movement was bad for women -
trying to destroy the women's movement, such as Phyllis Schlafly was doing.
3) The notion that abortion was a murder.
4) So-called "feminists" who felt that women were being denied the "right" to be homemakers. (What kind of bullshit was that?)
And much more.
And then all of a sudden appeared The Handmaid's Tale. It might appear a bit sci-fi and futuristic, but in truth it's a very clear look at what our country would be like if right wing "Christians" (and yes, the quotations are intentional), took over. It scared the living daylights out of me and still does, because it's all too real. Their motives and what they seek even in 2012, are made evident in the book. They're still trying to destroy women's rights, as we know all too well if we read the news.
Here's an excerpt from an article published this year about this polemic 1980s book which tells it like it is about right wing "Christians":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/20/handmaids-tale-margaret-atwood
The Handmaid's Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions. It has become a sort of tag for those writing about shifts towards policies aimed at controlling women, and especially women's bodies and reproductive functions...
...The Handmaid's Tale has often been called a "feminist dystopia", but that term is not strictly accurate. In a feminist dystopia pure and simple, all of the men would have greater rights than all of the women. It would be two-layered in structure: top layer men, bottom layer women. But Gilead is the usual kind of dictatorship: shaped like a pyramid, with the powerful of both sexes at the apex, the men generally outranking the women at the same level; then descending levels of power and status with men and women in each, all the way down to the bottom, where the unmarried men must serve in the ranks before being awarded an Econowife...
...Like any theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New. Since ruling classes always make sure they get the best and rarest of desirable goods and services, and as it is one of the axioms of the novel that fertility in the industrialised west has come under threat, the rare and desirable would include fertile women – always on the human wish list, one way or another – and reproductive control. Who shall have babies, who shall claim and raise those babies, who shall be blamed if anything goes wrong with those babies? These are questions with which human beings have busied themselves for a long time...
= new reply since forum marked as read
