Theme Of Propaganda In The Handmaid's Tale

Women in today’s society have made leaps and bounds to becoming men’s equals, but what if in the future all the progress women have made was reversed in an instant? What if women were no longer able to hold money, hold a job, or make the most basic decisions for themselves? Their only job is to bear children and listen to the orders from men because men are the superior gender. In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Republic of Gilead exercises total control over its people, women in particular, by the use of religion as the basis for their society and the use of propaganda to restrict the citizens.
Religion pervades aspect of life in the Society of Gilead and is another scheme put in place by the men to abuse their power over women. There is not an …show more content…
Aunt Lydia pushes this idea on then by saying, “Imagine… wasting their time like that, when they should have been doing something useful. Back then, the Unwomen were always wasting time. The government gave them money to do that very thing.” The women’s centers are used to teach the handmaid’s that they are inferior and always to be subservient to men. They teach them to be this way by using examples of how women used to be, such as the ones in today's society. They say that women working is a waste of time and the government is paying them to waste their time. The new society believes that a woman’s God-given duty is to bear children and that it makes them useful to society. The Aunts use the misleading idea that women working is a waste of time and videos of Unwomen doing terrible jobs as a means of keeping control over the handmaids. Many of the handmaid’s, especially the ones who did not work in the previous society, are brainwashed by what the Aunts have been teaching them, which allows them to be completely controlled by the