How Did Second-Wave Feminism Influence Margaret Atwood’s Creation of The Handmaid’s Tale?
Second-wave feminism profoundly influenced Margaret Atwood’s creation of The Handmaid’s Tale by providing the theoretical framework, political consciousness, and social critique that shaped the novel’s exploration of reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and patriarchal oppression. Atwood, writing in the early 1980s during the height of second-wave feminist activism, drew directly from feminist debates about women’s legal status, sexual politics, workplace discrimination, and reproductive freedom to construct Gilead’s dystopian reversal of feminist gains. The novel serves as both a response to second-wave feminism’s achievements and a warning about their fragility, imagining a society where feminist progress has been systematically dismantled and women have lost all rights secured through decades of activism.
What Was Second-Wave Feminism and Its Core Concerns?
Second-wave feminism emerged in the early 1960s and continued through the 1980s, representing a comprehensive movement that expanded beyond first-wave feminism’s focus on suffrage to address systemic gender inequality across all social institutions. This feminist wave tackled reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, domestic violence, sexual harassment, legal inequalities, and the cultural construction of gender roles (Friedan, 1963). Key texts like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique articulated the widespread dissatisfaction of educated women confined to domestic roles, while activists organized around concrete legal reforms including equal pay legislation, abortion rights, and protections against sex-based discrimination. Second-wave feminists challenged the public-private distinction that had kept women’s domestic oppression invisible, arguing that “the personal is political” and demanding recognition that gender inequality pervaded intimate relationships, family structures, and personal identity formation as much as public institutions.
The movement encompassed diverse perspectives and sometimes contentious debates about strategy, priorities, and the intersection of gender with race and class oppression. Liberal feminists focused on legal equality and institutional reform, working within existing systems to secure equal rights legislation like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments (MacKinnon, 1989). Radical feminists, by contrast, argued for fundamental restructuring of patriarchal society, analyzing how male dominance operated through sexuality, reproduction, and violence against women. Socialist feminists connected gender oppression to capitalist economic structures, while Black feminists and women of color critiqued mainstream feminism’s tendency to center white, middle-class women’s experiences while marginalizing other forms of oppression. Despite these internal debates, second-wave feminism achieved substantial legal and cultural transformations including legalized abortion through Roe v. Wade in 1973, expanded educational and employment opportunities for women, greater public awareness of domestic violence and rape, and shifting cultural attitudes about women’s roles and capabilities. This context of both achievement and ongoing struggle directly informed Atwood’s imagining of a society that deliberately reverses feminist progress.
How Did Reproductive Rights Debates Shape The Handmaid’s Tale?
Reproductive rights constituted one of second-wave feminism’s most contentious and significant battlegrounds, making them central to Atwood’s dystopian vision. The feminist movement fought for women’s access to contraception, legal abortion, and comprehensive reproductive healthcare, arguing that bodily autonomy represented a fundamental prerequisite for women’s equality and freedom (Firestone, 1970). The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide, represented a major feminist victory that recognized women’s constitutional right to privacy and reproductive choice. However, this victory immediately sparked intense opposition from religious and conservative groups who organized to restrict abortion access and challenge feminist gains. By the early 1980s, when Atwood was writing The Handmaid’s Tale, this backlash had gained considerable political momentum with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the Religious Right, creating anxiety among feminists that reproductive rights might be rolled back or eliminated entirely.
Atwood’s novel directly engages these reproductive rights debates by imagining their worst-case scenario: a society where women have been completely stripped of reproductive autonomy and reduced to their fertility. In Gilead, fertile women become Handmaids whose sole function is bearing children for elite couples, their bodies legally and religiously defined as national resources rather than their own property (Atwood, 1985). The novel’s central ritual, the Ceremony, represents institutionalized rape justified through reproductive necessity, literalizing feminist warnings about how reproductive control enables broader oppression of women. Atwood drew inspiration from actual historical and contemporary examples of state control over women’s reproduction, including Nazi Germany’s breeding programs, Romania’s forced pregnancy policies under Ceausescu, and religious fundamentalist movements’ efforts to eliminate abortion access. The novel responds to second-wave feminist analysis that identified reproductive control as essential to patriarchal power—if women cannot control their own fertility, they cannot fully participate in public life, pursue education and careers, or exercise fundamental autonomy. By depicting a society that has eliminated all reproductive choice, Atwood validates feminist arguments about reproduction’s centrality to women’s liberation while warning that these rights remain vulnerable to political and religious opposition.
What Role Did Feminist Critiques of Patriarchy Play in Shaping Gilead?
Second-wave feminist theorists developed sophisticated analyses of patriarchy as a systematic structure of male dominance that operates across social, political, economic, and cultural institutions, and these theoretical frameworks directly shaped Atwood’s construction of Gilead. Radical feminists like Kate Millett argued that patriarchy represents a comprehensive political system where men as a group dominate women as a group, maintained through both institutional power and interpersonal violence (Millett, 1970). Feminist scholars analyzed how patriarchal ideology naturalizes male dominance by claiming that gender inequality reflects biological differences rather than social construction, and how patriarchal systems control women through restricting their access to education, economic independence, political participation, and physical mobility. These feminist insights inform every aspect of Gilead’s structure, which represents patriarchy in its most extreme and explicit form, stripped of the democratic and liberal constraints that partially limit male dominance in contemporary Western societies.
Atwood takes feminist theory’s abstract analysis of patriarchal structures and renders them concrete and literal in Gilead’s society. Women are prohibited from reading, owning property, working for wages, or accessing money—restrictions that eliminate the educational and economic independence that second-wave feminists identified as essential to women’s equality (Atwood, 1985). The novel’s rigid hierarchy of female roles—Wives, Handmaids, Marthas, Aunts, Econowives, and Unwomen—literalizes feminist analysis of how patriarchy divides women from each other and assigns value based on their relationships to men and their reproductive utility. Gilead’s system of surveillance, where women monitor each other and public executions terrorize potential resisters, reflects feminist understanding of how patriarchal power operates through both direct violence and creating conditions where women police themselves and each other. Furthermore, Atwood’s depiction of the Commanders’ hypocrisy—secretly violating the religious rules they publicly enforce—validates feminist arguments that patriarchal ideology serves male interests rather than any genuine moral principle. The novel essentially asks readers to recognize patriarchal elements that exist in their own societies by magnifying and intensifying them, making visible power relations that contemporary gender inequality partially obscures.
How Did Second-Wave Feminism’s Analysis of Women’s Work Inform the Novel?
Second-wave feminists extensively analyzed women’s labor, both paid and unpaid, challenging the devaluation of women’s work and demanding recognition of domestic labor’s economic value while fighting for equal access to paid employment. Feminist economists calculated the market value of housework, childcare, and emotional labor that women performed without compensation, arguing that this unpaid work subsidized capitalist economies while keeping women economically dependent on men (Oakley, 1974). Simultaneously, feminists fought workplace discrimination, demanding equal pay for equal work, access to traditionally male-dominated professions, protections against sexual harassment, and policies like paid maternity leave that would enable women to combine employment with motherhood. These dual concerns—recognizing domestic work’s value while expanding women’s opportunities beyond the domestic sphere—created productive tensions within feminist thought about whether liberation meant gaining access to male-dominated public work or transforming society’s understanding and organization of all forms of labor.
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale engages these feminist debates about women’s work through Gilead’s rigid gender-based division of labor that reduces women exclusively to domestic and reproductive functions. The novel presents a society where women’s paid employment has been completely eliminated and their domestic roles have been hyper-specialized—Wives manage households but do not cook or clean, Marthas perform domestic labor, and Handmaids exist solely for reproduction (Atwood, 1985). This extreme division represents a perverse actualization of some conservative arguments about women’s “natural” domestic roles that feminists fought against. Offred’s memories of her previous life include her job, financial independence, and ability to make autonomous decisions, highlighting what women lose when excluded from paid labor. The novel suggests that economic independence represents a prerequisite for other freedoms—once women cannot earn money, control bank accounts, or own property, they become completely dependent on male relatives or the state, enabling comprehensive control over their lives. Atwood’s depiction validates feminist arguments that women’s workplace participation represents not simply personal choice but political and economic necessity for genuine equality. The ease with which Gilead strips women of employment—simply firing all women in a single day and freezing their bank accounts—underscores how fragile women’s economic gains remain without structural protections and continued vigilance.
What Influence Did Anti-Feminist Backlash Have on The Handmaid’s Tale?
The anti-feminist backlash of the late 1970s and early 1980s directly influenced Atwood’s creation of The Handmaid’s Tale, as she observed conservative and religious movements organizing to reverse feminist achievements and restore traditional gender roles. The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s successful campaign against feminist policies, and the rise of the Religious Right under figures like Jerry Falwell demonstrated that feminist progress faced organized opposition with genuine political power (Faludi, 1991). These anti-feminist movements argued that feminism destroyed families, harmed children, violated religious values, and contradicted women’s natural roles, and they mobilized effectively to restrict abortion access, oppose equal rights legislation, and promote conservative gender ideology. Atwood witnessed these political developments and recognized that feminist gains could not be taken for granted but remained vulnerable to reversal if conservative movements gained sufficient power.
The Handmaid’s Tale directly responds to this anti-feminist backlash by imagining its ultimate success—a society where anti-feminist arguments have been actualized through state power. Gilead’s ideology closely mirrors actual rhetoric from the Religious Right and anti-feminist activists, including claims that women are happier in traditional roles, that feminism harmed families and children, and that women’s liberation caused social breakdown (Atwood, 1985). Characters like Serena Joy, a former televangelist who advocated for traditional values before Gilead’s rise, represent real anti-feminist activists like Phyllis Schlafly who promoted women’s return to domesticity. The novel reveals the fundamental hypocrisy of anti-feminist movements that claim to protect women while actually advocating for women’s subordination—Serena Joy discovers too late that the traditional society she promoted has eliminated her public voice and influence entirely. Atwood’s warning proves prescient as she demonstrates how quickly rights can be eliminated when authoritarian movements exploit crisis and fear. The novel suggests that feminists must remain vigilant against backlash movements and recognize that gender equality requires active defense rather than passive assumption of its permanence. By showing how Gilead consolidated power through emergency measures following a crisis, Atwood warns that democratic rights remain fragile and that movements claiming to protect traditional values may actually establish comprehensive oppression.
How Did Second-Wave Feminist Literary Criticism Influence Atwood’s Writing?
Second-wave feminism transformed literary criticism by examining how literature perpetuates or challenges gender ideologies, analyzing female characters’ representation, and recovering women writers erased from canonical literary history. Feminist critics argued that literature both reflects and constructs social attitudes about gender, and they developed reading strategies that identified misogyny, stereotyping, and limited representation of women’s experiences in canonical texts (Showalter, 1977). This critical movement encouraged women writers to create literature that centered female perspectives, challenged patriarchal narratives, and imagined alternative social possibilities. Feminist science fiction writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy used speculative fiction to explore gender construction and imagine societies with different gender systems, establishing a tradition of feminist dystopian and utopian literature that questioned naturalized gender assumptions.
Atwood, herself an accomplished literary critic and feminist, consciously positioned The Handmaid’s Tale within this feminist literary tradition while also complicating simplistic utopian visions. The novel employs several feminist literary strategies including first-person female narration that centers women’s subjective experience, attention to domestic detail and women’s embodied experience, and critique of how language constructs gender ideology (Atwood, 1985). Offred’s narrative voice resists Gilead’s attempt to reduce her to a reproductive vessel by maintaining her memory, irony, and critical consciousness, demonstrating feminist arguments about women’s resistance through language and storytelling. The novel’s structure, which withholds complete narrative resolution and includes the ambiguous “Historical Notes” epilogue, refuses the authoritative, omniscient narration that feminist critics identified with patriarchal literary tradition. Atwood also engages feminist debates about essentialism—whether women share universal experiences or whether gender intersects with other identities like race, class, and sexuality. The novel presents various women with different relationships to power and oppression, avoiding monolithic representation of women as either victims or heroes. Through this sophisticated literary approach informed by feminist criticism, Atwood creates a text that both employs and interrogates feminist literary strategies, contributing to ongoing feminist conversations about representation, resistance, and the politics of storytelling.
Conclusion
Second-wave feminism fundamentally shaped Margaret Atwood’s creation of The Handmaid’s Tale by providing the political analysis, theoretical frameworks, and social context that informed the novel’s dystopian vision. Atwood drew directly from feminist concerns about reproductive rights, economic independence, patriarchal structures, and anti-feminist backlash to construct Gilead as a society that represents the reversal of feminist achievements and the actualization of patriarchal ideology without democratic constraints. The novel serves multiple functions within feminist discourse: it validates feminist analysis by demonstrating the logical extremes of patriarchal power, it warns against complacency by showing how quickly rights can be eliminated, and it challenges readers to recognize elements of Gilead in their own societies. Atwood’s masterpiece remains relevant precisely because it emerges from second-wave feminism’s insights about gender, power, and politics while transcending any single historical moment. The novel continues to resonate with contemporary readers because the feminist concerns it addresses—reproductive autonomy, economic equality, resistance to patriarchal control—remain urgent and contested, demonstrating that the feminist project second-wave activism advanced requires ongoing commitment and vigilance.
References
Atwood, M. (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart.
Faludi, S. (1991). Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Crown Publishers.
Firestone, S. (1970). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. William Morrow and Company.
Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. W.W. Norton & Company.
MacKinnon, C. A. (1989). Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Harvard University Press.
Millett, K. (1970). Sexual Politics. Doubleday.
Oakley, A. (1974). The Sociology of Housework. Pantheon Books.
Showalter, E. (1977). A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton University Press.