Margaret Atwood Wrote History Before It Happened

And so can we!

It’s a futuristic feeling, that Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is not discussed as much as it used to be. It doesn’t have to be. These oddly dressed figures below are now part of our culture.

Margaret Atwood shared this on her Twitter feed

When The Handmaid’s Tale came out in the mid-1980’s, my friends couldn’t stop talking about it. I’m the kind of person who cries over love songs and has nightmares over scary movies. But I finally decided to try to read it.

I couldn’t get past the first few pages. I put it aside for later and now it seems too late. Three years ago Atwood published a sequel, The Testaments. Maybe you can tell me about it.

L to R: Original cover of The Handmaid’s Tale that I had in my hands; later version; Testaments cover

In her essay, “The Writing of The Testaments” (2020), Atwood says she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in the early 1980’s at the beginning of a right-wing pushback against the New Deal, a post-war boom, and an equalizing movement in people’s incomes.

Part of the pushback was the rise of the religious right and its determination to reverse the changes made by the second-wave women’s movement of the 1970’s. “In particular, these people wanted to control women’s bodies,” Atwood writes.

This has happened before. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an inspiration for the French Revolution, believed women should stay at home where they could best serve others. During the early part of the Revolution women gained some rights. But soon after that they were expected to produce and raise the next generation of male republican Frenchmen. In his Code of 1810, the self-crowned Emperor Napoleon declared abortion a felony. (He also legalized slavery.)

Under Napoleon’s rule, a woman who had an abortion was threatened with imprisonment

Atwood writes that in the United States in the 1970’s,

… the main [right-wing pushback against feminist policies] was to outlaw any form of birth control. Not that this was coupled with assistance to those forced into childbearing. …

So The Handmaid’s Tale was written in response to questions I was asking myself about what would happen if these people gained power and what they would do. Pretty much what they were saying they would do. Women should be in the home, and the way to guarantee that was to deprive them of jobs and money. They should serve the needs of men, as Rousseau said they should; otherwise, they had no use.

It’s happened at other times in human history, she says. After the horrific 9/11 attack in 2001 and the 2008 economic meltdown due to reckless policies, people wanted safety and security. By 2016 the stage was set for chaos-making right-wing zealots and a would-be dictator who promised to fix the chaos, while he was taking over positions of power such as the Supreme Court.

I will add to her narrative, with the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, women’s bodies are again the target for a punishing policy. It signals further repressions.

The signs tell the story in this protest against the Supreme Court decision taking away women’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions, Brevard NC, June 25, 2022; top photo by Diana Refsland; bottom photos by Tiffany Teso

Atwood ends her essay, “The Testaments”, by saying,

I write books about possible unpleasant futures in the hope that we will not allow these futures into reality. … There’s fear and there’s hope; the two are not unconnected.

Under what circumstances do we wish to live? Perhaps this is the real question we should be asking ourselves.

I take from this that the rights of women (and others) are vulnerable because they depend on circumstances. But circumstances can be changed. It’s up to us to replace the current narrative with the story of how we want to live. Let’s get talking.

Margaret Atwood’s quotes and my paraphrasing are from her essay, “The Writing of The Testaments” in Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004 to 2021 by Margaret Atwood, Doubleday, NY, 2022

Napoleonic Code photo