Banned Books Week 2021 - Spotlight on a favorite: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood has made the 100 most frequently challenged books list for three decades (since the ALA started collecting data in 1990), in 1990-1999, 2000-2009, and 2010-2019.

The following are specific years (2001-2020) and reasons for challenges of this book:

2020

Banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones.”

This classic novel was included on a reading list before the beginning of a twelfth-grade advanced placement literature and composition class at a north Atlanta suburb’s high school in Georgia. A student’s mother forbade him from choosing the book. Alleging “porn and gore and cursing,” the mother wanted the book removed from the high school and held prayer circles outside the library while a committee of more than a dozen staff, administrators, and parents discussed the item. Retained.

This dystopian novel was offered as a curriculum choice to students in an elective high school English class in Marietta (OH). Two complaints were filed alleging vulgarity and sexual overtones, although school officials believed the cited passages did not reflect the context of the novel. The school board voted to retain the book in the curriculum.

2018

Retained on Wyomissing (PA) High School’s summer reading list of books recommended for juniors and seniors, after a group of parents attempted to get the novel removed because of vulgar language and graphic depictions of sex. At a curriculum and technology committee meeting with the acting superintendent, administrators decided to retain the book and develop additional options for families who choose not to read it.

2014

Challenged, but retained as required reading for a Page High School International Baccalaureate class and as optional reading for Advanced Placement reading courses at Grimsley High School in Guilford County (NC) because the book is “sexually explicit, violently graphic and morally corrupt.” Some parents thought the book is “detrimental to Christian values.”

2013

Challenged as required reading for a Page High School International Baccalaureate class and as optional reading for Advanced Placement reading courses at Grimsley High School in Guilford County (NC) because the book is “sexually explicit, violently graphic and morally corrupt.”

2007

The Judson (TX) school board overturned the superintendent’s ban of the novel from an advanced placement English curriculum. The review committee of students, teachers and parents had appealed the ban to the school board.

2006

The Judson (TX) school board overturned the superintendent’s ban of the novel from an advanced placement English curriculum.

2002

Challenged in Texas due to description’s of sexual encounters.

2001

Downgraded from “required” to “optional” for the 11th grade summer reading list in Upper Moreland (PA) school district for age inappropriate subject matter.

Source: https://www.marshall.edu/library/bannedbooks/the-handmaids-tale/

"Atwood said she didn’t include any events in the book that hadn’t already happened in history or any technology not already available. “No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities,” she wrote in the New York Times in 2017. The result is a book about a theocratic dictatorship that takes over the United States after climate change and declining birth rates threaten to cripple the nation’s economy. Fertile women are reproductive slaves, forced to bear children for the elite. In the 1980s, when it was published, the book read as a response to the political rise of Christian fundamentalists, the bombing of abortion clinics and the control of those behind the Iron Curtain. As we sit in 2021 with climate change threatening our coastlines and crops, a rising threat of nationalism and attempts to chip away at the hard-fought rights of women, minorities and the LGBTQ community, the plot seems evermore an apt prediction. What could be more important now than a book that explores the dangers of totalitarianism as we watch democracy challenged on the very steps of Congress? A book that explores the power of women as the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements push the next wave of feminism forward? A book with dire warnings about what can happen when resources get scarce, as drought and wildfires have become the new norm for a swath of our country? Because of its plausibility, "The Handmaid’s Tale" is timeless and relevant. It was a necessary book in the 1980s and it's still a necessary book in 2021." – Katie Wedell

(from a USA Today article, September 28, 2021)

An excerpt from my thoughts on the book when I read it in 2017:

"I'm wondering if now was a good time to read a book like this...because it scared me, and I had a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach throughout reading it. I now realize that it's an important read because it demonstrates why we must fight to keep the freedoms we have won. We must not let our status as women be demoted to that of the women in this book. We must not let the tenets of our Constitution (United States) be trampled upon. The freedom of speech, of the press, to address grievances. The separation of church and state."

Read the rest of my thoughts on the book here. 

 

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