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In reply to the discussion: Amy Coney Barrett is not a handmaid [View all]Hortensis
(58,785 posts)15. "The title of handmaid was adopted by People of Praise in reference to
the biblical description of Mary as the handmaid of the Lord, according to the group.
Former members including Art Wang, a member from the late 1980s until 2015, told The Post that handmaids, now known as women leaders, give advice to other women on issues such as child rearing and marriage."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/amy-coney-barrett-people-of-praise/2020/10/06/5f497d8c-0781-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/amy-coney-barrett-people-of-praise/2020/10/06/5f497d8c-0781-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html
People of Praise are Coney Barrett's group. A different one, People of Hope, is still more extreme.
...when Margaret Atwood explained her Handmaids Tale inspirations to the New York Times in 1987, she described one of them as a Catholic charismatic spinoff sect, which calls the women handmaids. Atwood did not at the time name the sect, ...
Asked about her inspiration for The Handmaids Tale by Politico as the controversy heated up, Atwood said she wasnt sure which group she was talking about in 1987. Her archive of work and research is at the University of Toronto, where she cant currently access it due to Covid-19 restrictions. But shes on the record as going through her Handmaids Tale archives for journalists plenty of times in the past, and during those interviews, shes always cited People of Hope, a different Catholic charismatic spinoff that calls women handmaids.
Specifically, People of Hope is a fundamentalist group in New Jersey that some former members have said behaves like a cult and which has allegedly arranged marriages between teenagers. The People of Hope call wives handmaids,...
... Atwood was drawing from the cultural norms of lots of different North American charismatic Christian groups at the time, including harmless ones. The reason theres so much confusion about exactly where she took the word handmaid from is that handmaid is the kind of word a lot of North American charismatic Christian groups were into in 1984: suggestive of purity, duty, and feminine obedience to divine will. (Me:
Biblical roles for women.) Again, that does not mean these groups were practicing sexual slavery. It means they were working with a very specific vocabulary, and the way Atwood made her dystopia feel real was by skillfully mimicking them.
https://www.vox.com/culture/21453103/amy-coney-barrett-handmaids-tale-supreme-court
Asked about her inspiration for The Handmaids Tale by Politico as the controversy heated up, Atwood said she wasnt sure which group she was talking about in 1987. Her archive of work and research is at the University of Toronto, where she cant currently access it due to Covid-19 restrictions. But shes on the record as going through her Handmaids Tale archives for journalists plenty of times in the past, and during those interviews, shes always cited People of Hope, a different Catholic charismatic spinoff that calls women handmaids.
Specifically, People of Hope is a fundamentalist group in New Jersey that some former members have said behaves like a cult and which has allegedly arranged marriages between teenagers. The People of Hope call wives handmaids,...
... Atwood was drawing from the cultural norms of lots of different North American charismatic Christian groups at the time, including harmless ones. The reason theres so much confusion about exactly where she took the word handmaid from is that handmaid is the kind of word a lot of North American charismatic Christian groups were into in 1984: suggestive of purity, duty, and feminine obedience to divine will. (Me:
Biblical roles for women.) Again, that does not mean these groups were practicing sexual slavery. It means they were working with a very specific vocabulary, and the way Atwood made her dystopia feel real was by skillfully mimicking them.
https://www.vox.com/culture/21453103/amy-coney-barrett-handmaids-tale-supreme-court
Good article on "handmaid." Not to be mistaken for a defense of her. She doesn't belong on our high court, I believe for many very serious reasons.
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Except for the time when she served as what is known as a handmaid in People of Praise.
WhiskeyGrinder
Sep 2021
#1
Thank you. Sounds like a more highly successful version of Tulsi Gabbard. Do you have some links?
Hekate
Sep 2021
#35
The author of the Handmaid's tale was aware of Catholic cults and adopted the term for her novel. nt
pnwmom
Sep 2021
#18
More people are familiar with the series than Phoney Barrett's church/cult affiliation
FoxNewsSucks
Sep 2021
#28
Also, mapping the HT universe onto current events erases the reality of a lot of people who aren't
WhiskeyGrinder
Sep 2021
#10
THT focuses on the experience of white women and posits a dystopian future,
WhiskeyGrinder
Sep 2021
#32
True. But when it comes to forced rape pregnancy of a handmaid, she is the enforcer of rape and
boston bean
Sep 2021
#24
Thank you....been trying to explain that here and to others saying that in conversations
Pachamama
Sep 2021
#34