Thoughts on "Blame It on Feminism"

Susan Faludi's essay "Blame It on Feminism" helped me to better understand what exactly feminism means. (For the record, I am grappling with what to do with this word...does it belong in all caps, with a capital letter "f", in plain text...in the end, as you can see, I went with italics, but I am still not certain that this is entirely satisfactory.)  According to Faludi, "the point of feminism...is to win women a wider range of experience" (53).  She goes on to state that feminism asks two things:
1. "that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness."
2. "that women be free to define themselves instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men."  (53)

The second point in particular resonates with me, especially in light of the literature we have read so far in this course.

In part because I am sitting here now, reading, writing and thinking about things of my own accord, I can't help but consider the treatment of the women by the men in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and, more recently, in terms of the course syllabus, in The Handmaid's Tale.  Faludi's notion of women being "free to define themselves instead of having their identity defined for them...by their men" is glaringly absent in the aforementioned texts.  Though male dominance (to the point of misogyny?) is much more pervasive in the culture described in The Handmaid's Tale, there is undoubtedly evidence of a similar system of inequality in "The Yellow Wallpaper."  In particular, both cultures identify an inherent evil in the act of women writing.  Our narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper," upon sensing her husband's presence, guiltily confesses that "[she] must put this [diary] away, -- he hates to have me write a word" (27).  Similarly, when Offred discovers the Nolite te bastardes carborundorum etching on the floor of her closet she remarks that "it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn't yet been discovered" (62).  In both cultures, men deprive women of the opportunity to express themselves in writing.  These women are thinking, feeling, living and breathing beings without voices.  And in a concrete sense, Faludi's expectation that women should not have "their identity defined for them...by their men" is violated by the very fact that Offred has been renamed to satisfy a man's needs.  With the act of renaming, our narrator's very identity is stripped away.  Now, I say the renaming is an effort to satisfy a man's desires, but I suppose it could well be Serena Joy who had something to do with this act.  Does that then make the renaming even worse if one woman, who happens to be in a more powerful position, aids and abets in the destruction of another woman's identity?  Is a violation of women's rights all the more wicked if the perpetrator is herself a woman?  It is too late for Jenny to right her wrong of standing idly by while the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" deteriorated, but I am hopeful that Serena Joy eventually acknowledges that she has a responsibility to Offred to ensure that she, and all women of the world, have the freedom to participate in a "wider range of experience."