The Handmaid's Tale is rooted in the cultural and social realities of the 1980s United States as well as the realities of America during the era of plantation slavery. The 1980s saw a significant growth in right-wing sentiment in mainstream American society as well as in policies practices put forth by racist, misogynistic lawmakers and political leaders. Reproductive rights were significantly under attack, and the social strides made during the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s were also under threat.
In regard to its historical parallels, The Handmaid's Tale reflects the horrific reality of enslaved black women, perhaps unconsciously. The novel has been heavily criticized for a lack of awareness to the fact that the events it depicts were the actual reality of enslaved black women who were forced to bear the children of their white owners (almost entirely through having been raped by white men). The Handmaid's Tale is often seen as a warning for a dystopian future, but it could have been much more reality-based if it served as not only a warning for what could happen but also a reminder of what did actually happen to enslaved black women for centuries.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale looks at long-established Puritan traditions since the founding of the United States—values still cheered on by many American churches and political groups. From that, she imagines a scenario where the political, religious, and social structure of Plymouth Colony could return and be reimposed on the US, making it a patriarchal white supremacist fundamentalist Christian tyranny.
At the time Atwood was writing, Christian fundamentalism was reappearing in American politics in a way not seen since Prohibition and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. In both the 1920s and 1980s, minority civil rights movements were seen as threats to white dominance. Many implicitly racist Christian churches were horrified by the end of school segregation and integration, and they began home schooling, charter schools, and voucher movements. In both the 20s and 80s, birth control was also seen by fundamentalists as threatening, and women's independence outside the family and church was imagined to be attacking Christian gender roles. Thus, Atwood focuses on how a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship would seek, above all else, to control women's bodies and consider them fit for reproduction alone.
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer, but her The Handmaid's Tale is based on changes in society that came to the fore in the 1980s, including the election of Ronald Reagan, in part with the enthusiastic support of a resurgent evangelical Christian Right. The Christian Right rose on anti-feminist backlash. Phyllis Schafly, very dimly a model for Serena, used her considerable intelligence and power to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Likewise, Dr. Dobson's religious group, Focus on the Family, used female discontent with having to work outside the home to advocate for stay-at-home, traditional motherhood as well as traditional breadwinner gender roles for men. The Reagan era was also a period of getting tough on crime, with growing incarceration rates.
Atwood imagined these two trends into a dystopic future in which the Christian Right was able to topple democracy and establish a theocracy based on patriarchal, right-wing values, traditional gender roles, and an extreme, medieval version of "get tough on crime" policies.
In addition, the Baby Boomer birth rate dropped dramatically, and many thought it was a permanent change, not realizing that Boomers were merely delaying childbirth. That, along with legal abortion, led to fewer children being born and many fewer being put for adoption as the social stigma attached to unwed motherhood disappeared. That trend, coupled with anxieties about pollution, made it easy to picture a future in which sterility has become so widespread that the birth of a baby is a rare event.
Atwood's book is an argument against religious tyranny and for a diverse, democratic, secular, and egalitarian state.
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