Are We Headed for Gilead? Margaret Atwood Doesn't Say No.

First their bank cards stopped working. Then their jobs were eliminated. Rights like owning property were repealed. In early episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale series on Hulu, main character June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) flashes back to these warning signs of women’s rights getting stripped away one by one by the repressive “Republic of Gilead.” 

But loss of all individual rights, including over their own bodies? Violent subjugation? June wasn’t expecting that. In retrospect, women realized they should’ve been paying closer attention. 

My attention was roused last August when I heard author Margaret Atwood speak at a conference and drop that “everything” in her 1985 novel and its popular screen adaptation had “happened somewhere, sometime.” I read her novel 30 years ago, but I remember thinking its dystopian world was a worst-case scenario. Total fiction. 

Turns out, Atwood has connected her work to reality ad nauseam in interviews. I just wasn’t paying attention, which is exactly Atwood’s point. 

“We’re not living in Gilead yet, but there are Gilead-like symptoms going on,” Atwood warned in interviews years ago. Today those symptoms have reached a fever pitch. The future, Atwood said in August, will “depend on how we behave now, what actions we take.”

With Handmaid’s sequel The Testaments now out on Hulu, this seemed like a good time to start paying closer attention—and thinking about what actions to take.

Continue reading at Provoked Magazine.

Image courtesy of Hulu