Women’s confinement and struggle against the patriarchal family structure: a feminist analysis of selected women’s writing in the light of Kate Millett’s concept of sexual politics

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the main female characters in two short stories and a novel written in three different periods, using the conceptual analysis framework that Kate Millett puts forward in her 1970 work Sexual Politics. In her book Sexual Politics, Millett formulated two important concepts as “sexual politics” and “sexual revolution” and focused on how the family institution and genders were handled in literary works. The most important contribution of her work and the reason why it is one of the founding texts of the second wave feminist movement is that she sees the abolition of the traditional family structure as the basic prerequisite for a real sexual revolution. Millett saw the patriarchal social structure as the biggest obstacle to the emancipation of women. In this direction, the present work discusses stories of women who belong to the middle class and try to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers congruously in the traditional family lives of their historical periods, but lose their harmonious existence as soon as they feel that they are confined to this family structure. Studies to be considered are Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Doris Lessing's story "To Room Nineteen" (1963), and Margaret Atwood's novel "The Blind Assassin" (2000).