Dystopia Social and Historical Context

Question 1

Atwood Romania

Answer 1

• Romanian communist dictator declared law that all women had to have four babies
• Decree 770
• abortion and contraception restricted
• fertility under state control

Question 2

Atwood USA

Answer 2

• falling birth rates, repressive policies on contraception
• 1980s backlash to Roe v Wade and uniform reproductive rights
• body as political battleground

Question 3

Atwood Lebensborn

Answer 3

• based on Nazi eugenics to produce ‘racially pure’ Aryans
• kidnapping of children in Ukraine and Poland to be raised by German families

Question 4

Atwood Argentina’s Missing Children

Answer 4

• military dictatorship in 70/80s
• theft of babies from political dissidents and raised in conforming homes
• children furthering ideology

Question 5

Atwood Iran-Islamic revolution 1979

Answer 5

• some women supported a government that would strip them of their rights
• response to fears of erosion of culture and Westernisation
• mandatory Islamic dress code and morality police
• women can be beaten in public
• subjugation of women

Question 6

Atwood Moral Majority and Phyllis Schlafly

Answer 6

• response to Second-Wave feminism
• return to traditional values
• mobilisation of Christian right as a political force
• Serena Joy based on Phyllis Schlafly
• campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment and feminism

Question 7

Atwood and technology (reception)

Answer 7

• debit cards as a tracker and could be cut off as in THMT
• Chinese Communist party cut off social media websites and have their own internal network
• India cut access to internet in Kashmir

Question 8

Orwell Communism

Answer 8

• despite being a socialist, skeptical of collectivism
• 1984 as a model of communism in England
• Party modelled on Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia

Question 9

Orwell Spanish Civil War

Answer 9

• time in Spanish Civil War witnessed propaganda and corrosive impact on truth in newspapers

Question 10

Orwell BBC Propaganda

Answer 10

• tasked with creating propaganda to send to India to strengthen loyalty to Britain and hate to Germany
• he was regularly censored

Question 11

Orwell Nazi Germany

Answer 11

• burning of Jewish books and literate
• confiscation and destruction of German artwork
• Gestapo
• mass media censorship
• Hitler youth and ‘the Spies’
• destruction of individualism - Hitler’s desire to create ‘pure’ Aryan race, where value was
• Kristallnacht - threat of violence

Question 12

Orwell Stalin

Answer 12

• equality of women in Soviet regimes
• propaganda posters of Stalin holding children and liberating Russia (Big Brother)
• The Great Purge
• gulags and forced labour camps