Gender Roles In Margaret Atwood's The Feminist

In a world where women make up half of the population, women tend to not be treated as equal to men. Whether it be the role of housewife, equal pay, or the choice of what she can and can't do with her own body, men, I meant boys have decided it's their god given right to decide for women. they are superior to them in every single way. This in no way has stopped women- for many, many years, women have been tirelessly fighting the good fight, women rights. Hitting some roadblocks on the way, women have been making wide strides, with the goal always being equality between the genders. Under the circumstances in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Margaret Atwood feared a continued inequality between genders and what would become of women.
Extremists
Women knew they could handle it and this led to the Women's Liberation Movement. In 1957, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, a novel about the dissatisfaction suburban housewives felt with their lives at the time. In the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan says, “Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity”(Frieden 1). Women were discouraged, they wanted to do more with their lives and were told what they were doing was enough. Some women were scared to talk about it out loud, frightful of the trouble they could get in with their husbands. This did not stop some women, they continued to fight for their rights. They wrote in magazines, papers, wrote books, and spoke publically about how they truly feel. The Feminine Mystique, was just one example on how women weren't going to sit around quietly, then came the Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment did not make women have more power from the men, it did not mean they were going to steal all the men's job, but some saw it this way. The amendment was made to end sex discrimination and some people were just not accepting of it. Roberta W. Francis, chair of the ERA Task Force of the National Council of Women’s Organization, explains in her article “The History Behind the Equal Rights Amendment” that, “ERA did not succeed in getting three more state ratifications before the deadline. The country was still unwilling to guarantee women constitutional rights equal to those of men”(Francis NP). The amendment of 3 more states and it would pass but it just fell short. This showed that people were still not ready for equal rights here in America, the land of the “free”. Women may have fell short here but they kept the fighting and they still do