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'FREEDOM FROM' VS. 'FREEDOM TO.'. Conservative Kathleen Parker's columns remind me of those Aunts in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale. In the novel, set in some future fundamentalist and misogynistic Gilead (picture a Christian version of Taliban), the Aunts are employees of the patriarchy whose role is to brainwash and inculcate the young captured women to their proper roles as servants. One Aunt tells the protagonist of the novel how the new theocracy differs from the old society (one like ours) in its treatment of women:
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.Somehow I think that Parker would appreciate this advice, as she seems bent on offering women (or perhaps just other women) "freedom from". She has recently written on the topic of sexual harassment and rape in the U.S. military in Iraq. Her recipe for its removal is to remove women from the military or at least to sex-segregate them from the men. Freedom from, achieved with a few swift strokes. This sounds a lot like the fundamentalist Islamic scenarios for women's proper roles, which may be funny to only someone with my particular sense of humor, but I couldn't help laughing when I read this quote by Parker:
