Feminist utopias and questions of liberty: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as critique of second wave feminism

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Notes

Krishnan Kumar notes that Orwell repeatedly denied ‘that socialism or even the Soviet Union were [sic] his principal targets …’ (Kumar 1987:382).

For example, in 1984, vol. 7 of Women's Studies International Forum was a special issue entitled ‘Oh Well, Orwell—Big Sister Is Watching Herself: Feminist Science Fiction in 1984’, and Erin McKenna provides the following list of texts that contributed to the surge of interest in women's utopias in the 1980s and 1990s: ‘Frances Bartkowski's Feminist Utopias; Angelika Brammer's Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism; N. B. Albinski's Women's Utopias; N. Rosinsky's Feminist Futures; Marlene Barr's Future Females: A Critical Anthology; Marlene Barr and Nicholas Smith's Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations; Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin's Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative; and Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch's Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers’ (McKenna 2001:136).

This generational shift can be seen, for example, in Toril Moi's critical treatment of the seminal works of Elaine Showalter and Kate Millett, both of whom Moi accuses of outdated theoretical naiveté (Moi 1985:8, 29).