Gender Roles In The Handmaid's Tale

The craving for power over another person or group is an innate sense imbedded within people who seek to progress through the ranks of the social ladder. Dominance has consequently been the underlying motivation. Eventually, these conflicts lose significance and are often resolved in some manner. However, one issue left unsettled is the clash between genders: male and female. This divide has historically been unequal, almost always where men declare superiority over women. In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, she establishes a society where women are socially dissimilar when it comes to social ranking. Women are assigned roles by men in order to serve a purpose in the community and thus prevented from arising above their

Therefore, people maintain these preconceived ideals of the past because they fear the chaos that would occur if these roles were to change. This results from humans siding with what is known because it makes us feel comfortable with our situation. If this is the case, humans are unknowingly stunting the productivity of our civilization through resisting change. To begin, the article We Live in Blank White Spaces portrays the idea that modern day issues regarding human rights between men and women ultimately result from our corrupt history of marginalizing women. Many people concerned with the idea of feminism acknowledge the fact that women were mistreated in this manner to a greater extent in the past (as seen in more developed countries such as the United States and Germany). The situation has improved since then when comparing it to the way women are treated in these countries today. However, although we have collaborated together as a whole community to eliminate this gender “gap,” the prevalence of gender disparities is still highly evident in the present. The problem is that because this issue has improved, a large