Context

The Lady of Shalott

• Sexual temptation

• Tragic consequences of defiance

  • Offred’s ambiguous ending, the death of the Lady of Shalott

Phylis Schlafly

• American constitutional lawyer and conservative political activist

• Known for staunchly conservative political and social views, antifeminism, opposition to legal abortion, and her successful campaign against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.

  • Equal rights amendment - she argued that the Equal Rights would eliminate the male only draft, and that women would equally subject to conscription

  • In Illinois, the anti-ERA activists used traditional symbols of the American housewife, and took homemade foods (bread, jams, apple pies, etc.) to the state legislators with the slogans, “Preserve us from a congressional jam; vote against the ERA sham” and “I am for Mom and apple pie”

The Beveridge Report

In 1941, the Liberal politician William Beveridge set out to discover what kind of Britain people wanted to see after the war.

His report, officially entitled Social Insurance and Allied Services, was a key part of the plans to rebuild and improve Britain after the war had ended.

He declared that there were five giants on the road to reconstruction. These were:

• Want - an adequate income for all

• Disease - access to healthcare

• Ignorance - a good education

• Squalor - adequate housing

• Idleness - gainful employment

Ethnocentricity: a belief that your culture or ethnic group is superior to another's. Ethnocentric individuals are biased in that they draw conclusions about other cultural groups based on their own cultural values, norms, and traditions.

Cultural relativism: the view that all beliefs, customs, and ethics are relative to the individual within their own social context. In other words, “right” and “wrong” are culture-specific; what is considered immoral in another, and, since no universal standard of morality exists, no one has the right to judge another society’s customs.