the period and socio-economic changes

  The story takes places in New England, in a near fictional future. It takes place in a restricted area with big walls so that people cannot escape from their reality, otherwise there will be consequences. There is no freedom to do as they want or would like because of a health crisis that change the perspective of the world.  Now most young women are servants in houses and has no freedom of any kind. There only purpose is to be pregnant, something that is an exceedingly rare thing at that time. There is not economic system anymore because everything works with token, which are paper to give to the people at the shops so that they will give you what you need. But even if there is no money there is still social class and people that are unable to get those tokens.  

In the society of the novel, most of the northern Caucasian societies birth rates are low. They are many reasons explaining this decline, but it’s still a mysterious phenomenon in the fiction. One of the reasons explained in the book is the wide-spread availability of birth control of different kinds, and because of abortion. Moreover, it’s also linked to nuclear-plant accidents as well as to leakages from chemical and biological-warfare stockpiles and toxic-waste disposal sites (which there were many thousands). These materials were dumped into the sewage system. Lastly, the uncontrolled use of chemical insecticides, herbicides and other sprays didn’t help the situation. Those environmental disasters in addition with the declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. After, a regime follows in which social roles are very distinct and the remaining fertile women are enslaved and have to get pregnant to help the population growing process.

Firstly, it is useful to know that most aspects of the book are steeped in religious and political history. It is based on real-life events, so the book remains really relevant today, more than 30 years after its publication. The story takes place in Gilead in which the Constitution has been overthrown. As a result of this, women’s rights and identities have been stripped away, with fertile women being rounded up, red tagged, and forced into a life of sexual servitude and surrogacy. Atwood has pointed out time and time again that every aspect of Gilead’s culture has really happened at some point in history, somewhere in the world. Margaret said in an interview that when she wrote it, she was making sure she wasn’t putting anything into it that humans had not already done somewhere at some time before. Here is an example of why this book is still so relevant today. In Gilead, women are categorized into classes based on their relationship to men or usefulness to men. If you’re lucky, you’d be a “wife” in Gilead, married to a powerful man and able to sit quietly at the head of your household. The other classes of women are handmaids for their fertility, Marthas for their housekeeping or those who are infertile and therefore categorized as not even human and sent to the Colonies to die. In the U.S. today, rights over women’s bodies are argued over by primarily old, white men in government. In other parts of the world, women aren’t even allowed to leave the house without a man’s permission. Also in some states, they still don’t have the right of abortion even if a pregnancy was the consequence of rape or incest, which is shown in the book also that it was the way things were in the 1870s. Religion such as Christianity was also a big part of everyone’s life in the past, by far more than today. Every decision was took based on religious beliefs like in the Handmaid’ Tale.  

The Handmaid’s Tale is a fiction to what would’ve had happened if the government was led by religion, most specifically by a misinterpretation of the Old Testament. There are a lot of old values and ideologies that were conveyed by priests when they held power. We can see it in the story by the way woman are treated. The only things they can do are chores, cook, clean radioactive waste, being a commander's wife or procreate. All the important positions in the Republic of Gilead are occupied by men. In the republic, there is a wall where they hang people who committed crimes. In the novel, Offred mentioned some of them did "Gender Treachery", which means they were homosexuals. Some of them were doctors who proceeded abortion in the past and were caught. All those details show us that the men who hold power in the Republic of Gilead are conservatives.