Imagine your life being flipped upside down and everything that you have ever known changes. The once-esteemed United States government has fallen into totalitarian corruption and is suffering from the effects of a nuclear war that has wiped out most of the population. Now the only job for women is to conceive in the hope of rebuilding the population, but if you are infertile, you are labeled as an “unwoman” and sent to the “colonies” where they kill you for being “useless”. The society in The Handmaid’s Tale “strips women of their rights and forces those who are fertile to become ‘handmaids’ to bear children for wealthy men and their barren wives” (Dockterman). In the science fiction novel, author Margaret Atwood gives the reader insight into the life of one handmaid named Offred who has been assigned to live with a new Commander. Throughout the book, the reader gets to know Offred and the struggles that she faces every day, being held captive in sexual servitude. This book was published in 1985 when women were still considered lesser to men in the business world, socially, and in academia. The Handmaid’s Tale portrays what would happen if our country fell into crisis; women at the bottom of the food chain and power-hungry rich men at the top.
In a review on the back of the novel The Houston Chronicle said, “Atwood takes many trends which exist today and stretches them to their logical and chilling conclusions…An excellent novel about the directions our lives are taking… Read it while it’s still allowed.” It is clear that Atwood had strong feelings about the misogynist mentality of the 20th century and used The Handmaid’s Tale as a warning that if change did not occur, her speculative fiction novel could become our reality. The controlling social issue of The Handmaid’s Tale is the discrimination of women and their inequality to men. Atwood uses this novel to express her strong feelings about the pro-feminism movement. Feminism is formally defined as “a rebalancing between women and men of the social, economic, and political power within a given society, on behalf of both sexes in the name of their common humanity, but with respect for their differences” (Offen). In an interview, Atwood defines her view on feminism as “a ‘belief in the rights of women … [as] equal human beings’” (Neuman). The Handmaid’s Tale is written about a dystopian former United States that gives women no civil rights. Atwood’s definition of feminism is accurately applied in her setting of The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale to shock readers about what might happen to the United States if changes were not made to the equality of its citizens.
In her book Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman, author Gail Evans points out that “You’re always a mother, daughter, wife, or mistress” (Evans p. 31). This characterized how women were viewed in the 1980’s when The Handmaid’s Tale was released. Although more women were attending medical school, law school, and business school than at any time in history, women in the 80’s were viewed as having a role to play in the lives of men: men on the admissions committees, men that conducted job interviews, and men in the programs where they were taking a spot that had historically been occupied by another male, in other words, the men that were in charge of defining their futures. It was accepted as a norm to inquire about plans for marriage, children, the desire to work only a few years, or the goal of having a part-time career, implying an inherent lack of dedication to the profession the women desired to pursue. The 1980’s saw the first woman on the US Supreme Court, the first woman in space, the first black woman as Miss America, and the first woman as Secretary of Transportation.
George Guilder wrote in The Atlantic that “gender disparity in the workplace might have less to do with discrimination than with women making choices to stay at home… Half of all 1985 College graduates were women, and woman are earning a steadily rising share of all advanced degrees, including close to one third of all degrees in law, business, accounting, and computer and information services”. But, in the 1980’s, “ the women with the best credentials and qualifications -the top 10% in earnings capacity – exploited only one quarter as much of their financial potential as did similarly qualified men” (Guilder). Today in the 21st-century, women have come quite a long way from the time Atwood was writing about in the 1980s. There are hundreds of women all around the world making strides in the business world by being a CEO, chairman, corporate board member, owning their own company, etc. “Over decades—centuries, for that matter—women have worked to prove that they are strong and brave and smart; that they are leaders and revolutionaries; that they are more than mothers only; that motherhood is no lesser thing. It’s been proven time and again, but women still must demand the freedom to be imperfect—which is no more and no less than what every human deserves” (Smith).
As the pro-feminist movement is more prevalent than ever, it is no surprise that The Handmaid’s Tale has been revived in the modern age; being produced as a major television series on Hulu, and has won the prestigious Emmy and Golden Globe awards. The TV show has been a success and brought publicity to book “Channel 4 aired the debut episode of the series, starring Elisabeth Moss and Joseph Fiennes, at 9 pm on Sunday, and within hours the paperback of the Canadian author’s novel had reached number one in the Amazon charts” (Barnett). The show first aired in April 2017, at a time when the United States was consumed with the results of the Presidential election announced in early November of 2016. In the weeks before the election, TV outlets released a video of candidate Donald Trump joking about things that he could do to women because he was famous. When Trump won the 2016 election, there were many feminist movement uprisings and protests, some of which used The Handmaids Tale as a way to predict what our future would look like under our new President. “When Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss signed on to play the lead Offred in the Hulu adaptation of the landmark novel, most pundits had predicted that Hillary Clinton would be President. But just months after filming the show, Trump won the election and protesters at the Women’s March carried signs that read, ‘Make Margaret Atwood fiction again,’ and a Latin line from Handmaid’s, ‘Nolite te bastardes carborundorum’ (‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’)” (Dockterman).
The Handmaid’s Tale was Atwood’s warning shot to society in the mid-1980s that 20th-century misogyny could have serious, negative implications for the future of woman. In the 30+ years since the release of the novel, women have made great strides in business, politics, the arts, academics, and health care. But, as we are finding out, misogyny, sexual harassment and assault, intimidation, and coercion continue as bumps in the road to success for many. With the #metoo movement, the Pussy Hat Wearing protests, and threats of reputation-ruining posts exposing bad past behavior of prominent men on social media, there is a faction of women asserting feminism to an extreme. Are they taking it too far? Will their methods backfire? Will men cease to invite women to the business table, or to meetings, or to client dinners for fear that a word or a jester will be misinterpreted? Atwood’s speculation in her novel is as relevant today, as it was then.
Works Cited
- Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
- Barnett, David. “The Handmaid’s Tale Tops Book Charts after TV Series UK Debut.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 29 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/29/the-handmaids-tale-tops-book-charts-after-tv-series-uk-debut.
- Dockterman, Eliana. “On the Urgency of the Handmaid’s Tale.” Time, Time, 7 Sept. 2017, time.com/collection-post/4925657/margaret-atwood-and-elisabeth-moss/.
- Evans, Gail. Play like a Man, Win like a Woman: What Men Know about Success That Women Need to Learn. Broadway Books, 2000.
- Guilder, George. “Women in the Work Force.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 1 Sept. 1986, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1986/09/women-in-the-work-force/304924/.
- Neuman, Shirley. ”Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale.’ Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 246, Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1100079726/GLS?u=j057911001&sid=GLS&xid=75ff71d7. Accessed 24 Apr. 2018.
- Originally published in University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 857-868.
- Offen, Karen. “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach.” Signs, 1 Oct. 1988, www.jstor.org/stable/3174664.
- Smith, Rosa Inocencio. “The Empress Alexandra and the Freedom to Be Imperfect.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 8 Mar. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/03/the-freedom-to-be-imperfect/519009/.
