Topic Proposal

The topic I am going to do my research on is Feminism or the Feminist Movement. In Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the handmaids are strictly used for their ovaries. The wives are sterile, unable to bear children, so they are also abused in that they are made to accept the handmaids as surrogates. Their reproductive rights were taken away. All these women are oppressed, essentially second class citizens. They have no rights. The male dominant government controlled them in every way. The handmaids were not allowed to read, or even move about town freely.
“The feminist movement (also known as the Women's Movement, Women's Liberation, or Women's Lib) refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, voting rights, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. The goals of the movement vary from country to country, e.g. opposition to female genital cutting in Sudan, or to the glass ceiling in Western countries.
The movement's history has gone through three waves, beginning in the 18th century. The First-wave was oriented around the station of middle or upper-class white women, and involved suffrage and political equality. Second-wave feminism attempted to further combat social and cultural inequalities. Third-wave feminism was a reaction to and continuation from the second-wave, taking a post-structuralist analysis of femininity to argue that there is in fact no all-encompassing single feminist idea. It set itself against essentialist definitions of femininity, which assume a universal female identity, instead emphasizing discursive power and the ambiguity of gender. Third-wave theory incorporates elements of queer theory, anti-racism, and other hallmarks of modern progressivism.
The feminist movement has brought a sweeping variety of social and cultural change, its impact touching familial relations, religion, the place of women in society, gendered language, and relationships between men and women.”
“In his 1869 essay The Subjection of Women the English philosopher and political theorist John Stuart Mill described the situation for women in Britain as follows:
"We are continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband; no less so, as far as the legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called."
During the 1800s women in the United States and Britain began to challenge laws that denied them the right to their property once they married. Under the common law doctrine of coverture husbands gained control of their wives' real estate and wages. Beginning in the 1840s, state legislatures in the United States and the British Parliament began passing statutes that protected women's property from their husbands and their husbands' creditors. These laws were known as the Married Women's Property Acts. Courts in the nineteenth-century United States also continued to require privy examinations of married women who sold their property. A privy examination was a practice in which a married woman who wished to sell her property had to be separately examined by a judge or justice of the peace outside of the presence of her husband and asked if her husband was pressuring her into signing the document.”
I chose this topic, because I am a woman and I believe strongly in women’s rights. Atwood’s portrayal of women is her novel touched me in that I am opposed to treating anyone in this manner, especially women.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal of womens_history/v012/12.2braukman.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movement http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/property_1848ny.htm http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/geweb/PROPERTY.htm
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/366305/Married-Womens-Property-Acts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subjection_of_Women
Mill, John Stuart, The Subjection of Women. Dover Thrift Editions. 1869 (1997).