When Margaret Atwood first published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, some readers and book critics questioned her premise: An American government that rolls back women’s rights? Women protesting in the streets? People fleeing to Canada? Impossible.
“When I first published that book, at the outset some people were saying, ‘Oh, Margaret, how could you suggest that we would ever do such a thing,” Atwood, who is a member of the 2017 TIME 100, says. “I don’t hear that so much anymore.”
Atwood challenged herself to only include events in the book that had happened “somewhere at some time” before in history. She borrowed the conservative dress meant to both repress and protect women from the Puritans, the persecution of rebellious women from the Salem Witch Trials, the restriction on abortion from Nazi Germany and the notion of “handmaids” providing children for barren mistresses from the Bible.
MORE See Who Is on TIME’s List of the Most Influential People of 2017
Handmaid’s Tale, then, is not so much a parable or a warning as a projection based on history. How can people avoid repeating humanity’s mistakes and creating our own version of her dystopian Gilead? “They might vote—just to begin with,” she says.
- How to Help Victims of the Texas School Shooting
- TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2022
- What the Buffalo Tragedy Has to Do With the Effort to Overturn Roe
- Column: The U.S. Failed Miserably on COVID-19. Canada Shows It Didn't Have to Be That Way
- N.Y. Will Soon Require Businesses to Post Salaries in Job Listings. Here's What Happened When Colorado Did It
- The 46 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2022
- ‘We Are in a Moment of Reckoning.’ Amanda Nguyen on Taking the Fight for Sexual Violence Survivors to the U.N.