Moral Disorder: The Other Side of the Women’s Movement Side of the Women’s Movement

Moral Disorder: The Other Side of the Women’s Movement Side of the Women’s Movement

Although Margaret Atwood has explicitly refused to associate her works with the feminist movement, she has been hailed as a feminist writer who questions gender roles and social myths of femininity.However, few critics have discerned Atwood’s critique of feminist movement itself in such novels as Life Before Man and The Handmaid’s Tale.1The purpose of this paper is to introduce the neglected Moral Disorder, her latest collection of short stories, as one of the places where Atwood directly pays attention to the shortcomings of the second wave feminist movement.It analyzesMoral Disorderto see how it reflects the psychological impact of the social upheavals and consciousness-raising of the 1960s and 70s caused by the inauguration of the new feminist movement. As a consequence of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s, the concept of morality and the criteria according to which it was judged underwent a radical shift. Moral Disorder presents the uncertainties, anxieties and confusion of male and female characters of this period who struggled to make sense of their rapidly and radically changing world. By the late sixties Church, religion and state which were once regarded as the sole value system of morality were replaced by personal judgment that were more flexible and which resulted in loose, unstable marriages and an increase in marital infidelity. In Moral Disorder Atwood seems more concerned with the negative consequences of the feminist movement which was not able to provide either men or women with more practical egalitarian solutions.