Women In A Handmaid's Tale

In the novel A Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood portrays the life of women in the future dystopian society as unpleasant, brutal, and horrific. The women in the novel have no power and are only useful for having babies. Atwood shows her feelings on this matter through the main character, Offred, and the people she surrounds herself with. Handmaid’s, Martha’s, Unwomen, and the Wives are the groups that make up the social hierarchy. Atwood causes us to open our eyes and ask ourselves: are women in today’s society Handmaids, Martha’s, Unwomen, or the Wives. The lowest of all the women are the Unwomen. In the novel, they talk about how the Unwomen are unimportant, and how they do not want them seen or discussed. Unwomen are women without useful ovaries that do not serve any purpose to Gilead. These women are either living in the colonies or dead. The women of Gilead would rather die than being an Unwomen. Gilead controls everything they hear about the Unwomen. “They want us to hear the screams and grunts and shrieks of what is supposed to be either extreme pain or extreme pleasure or both at once, but they don’t want us to hear what the Unwomen are saying” (119). They only want the inhabitants of Gilead to hear the bad, not the good. Above the Unwomen there’s the Martha’s and the Handmaid’s. The …show more content…
These women show that if we were living in this type of society today to make sure to always follow the rules, and never make the wrong choices. Atwood makes you think should women in our society have that much power, or would it be a better place for men to be in control of women. It also makes us ask ourselves in our society are we treat women this way because we feel sorry for them, or are we just doing it to make them feel better. It also helps us appreciate women and what all they do for our society like: giving birth, cooking, cleaning, and being the best