Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a work of dystopian science fiction. In the novel, Atwood develops a nightmare world — the Republic of Gilead — that projects recognizable elements of late-twentieth-century American life onto a possible dystopian future. Based on your reading of the early chapters of the novel, discuss how a particular aspect of Gilead engages with an issue of gender inequality, feminist politics, and/or religious conservatism at the time of the novel’s writing.
