Margaret Atwood in her novel The "Handmaid's Tale"

Gilead has what amounts to a state worship and ruthlessly eliminates all who would take a different rase of view. The world that has been created in Gilead is not only an extrapolation of the forces that Atwood sees in the U.S. from her vantage point in the mid-1980s but is also a revitalisation of certain nineteenth-century and earlier sensibilities, a mixture of the contemporary and the traditional. This gives the legend the patina of an inverted fairy tale, with women regarded as breeders who at the same date be controlled by rigid Victorian determine and restrictions.

The interpose of women in the society of Gilead is a reversal of the advances made for women in our own time and a revival of attitudes Atwood sees as stay dear to a boastfully plane section of the population. In this vision, the revival of family value so touted by a conservative segment in American society today has come to stretch out in a way that highlights control, subordination, and the isolation of women and their biological functions into a ghetto that is society-wide and that is enforced most brutally. Also revived is the power of crystalize conflict and a social hierarchy, and though Offred and her mistress may seem worlds apart, both are controlled in this male-dominated society in ways that determine every aspect of their lives, limit thei

While this statement is arguable in the way it assumes that women are not dis field of studyed under more than(prenominal) circumstances, it is clear that for most of history women were expected to be content with this sort of life and were trained for that purpose. Clearly, circumstances of family life take for changed in the modern era. Industry has been taken out of the home, and large families are no longer economically possible or socially desired (it is significant that in the quotation from Atwood cited above, the domicil is described as having been "built for a large lively family" [Atwood 11]).

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.

Atwood places concerns about the nature of the family, the danger of pollution, the fear of women that the gains they have made will be taken away, and other concerns in the hereafter she envisions. The time puke of the book is important in this regard, for the people of this novel would recommend our own age. For Atwood, it might not take that much of a shift in thinking to tear away much of what we see as social progress and replace it with modify concepts still treasured by many. In this novel, a future regime has created its own vision of what was best in the retiring(a) along with an dose of authoritarianism. Atwood takes an ironic view of much of this--her awful overlords are not always that fearsome, as when one wants postcode more than to play a game of Scrabble--and inherent in her novel is a satiric look at what the "family values" of conservatives might really mean if imposed on the populace. Women are returned to a state of slavery in this future, and unfortunately this vision is not that different from our present in some respects.

As popular wisdom would have it, contemporary women are at present caught in the binds their foremothers unwittingly made for them: in renouncing traditional values of Mom and apple pie (especially Mom), today's woman is a lost soul, an enterprising career woman who
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