I believe this is not only true for the women’s stories in this book, but true for all women. It is very hard for to pick one particular story within this book that touched me the most, they were all powerful and had such interesting details. However in chapter two “Prohibition and Prostitution” they speak about how people get away with enslaving and trafficking village girls. The idea is to crush modern slavery, but for political reasons this does not always happen. It is known that crackdowns do exist and with the right help, training and rehabilitations these girls and women can feel they have purpose and worth.
The Life Story of Henrietta Muir Edwards Good morning, I’d like to introduce myself. I am Henrietta Muir Edwards. For those of you who don’t know me I’d like to give you a little background about myself. I am a Canadian women who may be the least well known of the “Famous Five”. I’m the eldest of the “Famous Five”, I am a legal expert and women often came to me for help with legal issues affecting women and children.
In The Power of the Positive Woman, Schlafly explains that there is indeed a difference, besides the obvious physicality, between men and woman that cause them to play different roles in society. She in no ways demoralizes the role of either men or women, but instead explains how each gender has an equally important role to play in society. She explains the ideals of liberationists by saying, “The second dogma of the women’s liberationists is that, of all the injustices perpetrated upon women through the centuries, the most oppressive is the cruel fact that women have babies and men do not” (Schlafly 296). This puts the blame of female anatomy on the males instead of on the Divine Creator of human lives. Although this seems to be a ridiculous reason to hate the male population, it is Schlafly’s way of making their movement seem ridiculous.
In the article, “Controlling your reality” Paige Pfleger states “Reality television can also preserve old fashioned notions about sexual stereotyping. Women are encouraged to fulfill roles as “the slut” and are simultaneously devalued by doing so” sadly these are the types of stereotypes young girls and women grow up with (3). Little girls are told to act a certain way only for society to reject and humiliate them for it. In The Hunger Games Collins makes a point by sexually objectifying Glimmer, a career tribute, because she looks like the stereotype of sexy. In the novel Collins writes, “The girl tribute from District 1, looking provocative in a see-through gold gown…With that flowing blonde hair, emerald green eyes, her body tall and lush… she’s sexy all the way”(125).Collins makes it clear that society has a very specific image of what sexy should look like.
Women often want to please other people and society’s ideas of what they should look like. The men in their lives also put a lot of subconscious pressure on girlfriends and wives to look as they once looked or like some celebrity. Women after giving birth bodies change and don’t get back to the way it was prior to pregnancy. This is a very common reason women have cosmetic surgery. Another
The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margaret Atwood, takes place in The Republic of Gilead where reproduction rates are declining. To counteract this, the remaining women with viable ovaries, called Handmaids, are assigned to high class households with hopes of conceiving a child. Feminism, a topic that is central to the novel, is the ideology of equality for women. However, the society in the novel is depicted as the exact opposite of feminism. By utilizing the Handmaids as a representation of the females in the Gileadean society, the author exposes the flaws of an anti-feminist society through objectification and the absence of agency.
Many middle class women were unhappy about this, and after the freedoms and empowerment of women during Weimar they did not like the new constrictions – it seemed almost like a step back for them. However, financial incentives were given to women to stay home and have children, and awards were granted depending on how many children a woman had – the more children, the higher ranking the award. They were told that it was their responsibility to provide soldiers for the future. As a result of this, many more women became mothers than might have down normally. Married couples were encouraged to divorce if their partner was infertile and many women joined Nazi women’s organisations.
Tsitsi Dangaremba's Nervous Conditions is used to portray the impact of these power hierarchies, and how it all comes down to the root of ‘Englishness’. The female characters are used in order to reveal how resistance to oppression works, even though the outcomes are successful to different degrees. Nervous Conditions demonstrates how the traditional, colonised women suffer the most. Dangaremba shows in the novel that regardless of the class and social status differentiating the women, oppression through colonialism and patriarchy exists in all forms: “The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate,” (Dangaremba 12). Tambu, the protagonist of the novel, right from the beginning explicitly reveals the hardship which the women endure.
The media scrutinizes against females that do not meet their standards, and try's to sell us the idea that happiness is found in being beautiful in their standards. This causes women to become overwhelmed with vanity, which causes them to follow the Medias unrealistic approach of true beauty. These goals include, staying thin, having certain body features, and need to stay young. This results in women seeking harmful diets, expensive cosmetic surgery, and spending excessive amounts on beauty products, all in order for them to stay beautiful. "Although media boasts a sparkling image of what every girl should look like, the simple fact is that most of us just don't.
The Aunts teach the Handmaids at the Red Centre about how women are now protected and respected. In reality, Gilead is turning women against women. The girls at the Red Centre are supposed to testify about their past lives, and when Janine confessed she was raped, the other Handmaids didn’t sympathise with her at all but were forced to condemn her that the rape was Janine’s fault because she led them on. And Offred admitted that “We meant it, which was the bad thing”. The condemnation might have started out because they were forced to but eventually the Handmaids enjoy comdemning each other.