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 put forward in her 1970 work Sexual Politics. Kate Millett formulated two important concepts as Sexual Politics and Sexual Revolution in her book Sexual Politics, and criticized the reactionary and sexist literary figures in the literary world after the first wave feminist movement. However, the most important contribution of her work and being 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. In this direction, literary works that deal with women who belong to the middle class and try to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers harmoniously in the traditional family lives of the period, but lose their mental balance in this process, fall in search of meaning, and drift into despair and suicide will be discussed. The works to be discussed are Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" (1963) and Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin" (2000). One of the reasons for choosing these three works is that their protagonists are in similar dilemmas and it is aimed to make sense of the gender politics that drag them into this dilemma through their traditional family structures