Woman By Sophia Washington
Being a woman has never been easy over the whole course of civilization. Although there have been improvements made, the prejudice against women has never stopped. In the book, The Handmaid’s Tale, author Margaret Atwood describes what being a woman in Gilead, before their freedom got taken away, looked like for the female characters in the book.
“I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: Don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night,” (Pg. 24).
Offred is expressing the things she learned growing up in Gilead because of her gender. What’s surprising to me is how well it connects with what women learn today about their personal safety. I became really independent as I grew older and that required me to go to a lot of places by myself. Some would say I didn’t look my age because I was on the taller side and had been more developed than those in my age range. The way I looked didn’t really phase me when I was traveling by myself because I was just a kid. But when I started high school, things changed drastically for me. Before I never experienced the dangers of being a woman in public because I was always in areas where I wouldn’t encounter things like that or I was with my family. My highschool was in a very different location than what I was used to. Even though I have lived in the city for most of my life, I was always on the outskirts rather than directly in the city. And whenever I was in the city, I would have an adult by my side. When starting highschool, this all changed because I started to go to the city by myself to go to school and other extracurriculars. Of course I was told to be safe and let my mom know where I am at all times but I didn’t really realize what she meant by “be safe,” until the school year started to go by and traveling in and out of center city was the norm for me.
I remember walking to the train station and the sidewalk I was walking on happened to be right next to a very busy street. As I was walking, a car slowed down past me, honked and whistled at me, and then drove off. I was confused at first but then realized it was a grown man in that car trying to cat-call me knowing I looked like a kid coming from school. It made me feel extremely uncomfortable and unsafe because I didn’t know if this was gonna be the last time something like this happened. This situation compares to the “rules” Offred describes in quote because even though I am in a completely different timeframe/reality from her, I still have to abide by the same rules she describes. When you get older and start to experience more unhinged things that men do towards you, you know deep down how to react to it and how to prevent it from happening. Experience teaches you lessons. I know now not to walk next to a busy street by myself or respond to strangers (majority men) who have bad intentions with me. My mom never told me these rules but I found them out just by being a woman.
Offred also mentions the change that the women in the book now encounter because of the government’s decisions. Now that all of them are handmaids, their reality has become completely different.
“Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles. There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it,” (Pg. 24)
She’s describing what life is like now that women are under the control of the government and how they only get freedom “from” them to do certain things. This caused more safety for the handmaids but made them seem like objects. As you get deeper into the book, Offred goes with her commander to a club and although she is technically protected, the men still look at her like she is something to judge from head to toe.
“The Commander does the talking for me, to this man and to the others who follow him. He doesn’t say much about me, he doesn’t need to. He says I’m new, they look at me and dismiss me and confer together about other things,” (Pg. 236).
The way they reacted to her makes me think what would happen if I was treated the same way in my reality. Would I be shut down just like that? Would I look weird? Although women are not represented as objects nowadays, some people still see us as one, which proves the point Margaret Atwood is trying to make. Gilead is not that much different than society today when you think about how women are treated. It’s not as obvious in our reality but it does still happen, creating windows between the book and real life.
