I guess I’m with liirogue here. It took until the 13th Amendment for freed black (male) slaves to get the voting privilege. It took until 1920 for any woman, of any color, in this country to get the privilege to vote (19th Amendment). I think that speaks volumes about what value this society placed on women - someone who was considered property at one time got to vote before any woman in this country.
No, in some ways I don’t think this story is too far flung.
Correction:
The 13th Amendment freed the slaves, the 14th Amendment gave freed black males (former slaves) the right to vote. Women, all of them, still had to wait until the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Another correction, in some states it was legal to vote pre 19th amendment, just not for Federal office.
But yes, just recently we passed a major milestone. Women have now (and its recent - within the past 10 years) had the vote for longer than it took to get it!
Until the mid 1970s there were all sorts of laws regarding women owning property, having credit in her own name, etc. (varying a lot by state) in the United States. Considering that this book was written in the mid 1980s - a mere decade or two since these laws had been overturned - not farfetched at all.
As to the “forced reproduction” aspects - I’ve been in rooms of infertile women trying to adopt healthy white babies. It isn’t unusual for women in these situations to support the 1950s mentality of removing parent rights from unwed mothers of healthy white children.
Thanks Dangerosa, I wasn’t aware of that.
Hated it.
It gave the Handmaid a name: Kate
“Kate” ends up living in a trailer in the mountains, waiting for the birth of her baby.
Nick ends up a freedom fighter.
The Handmaids’ veils were little red bridal veils perched far back on the heads, instead of the vision-obscuring nun’s “wings” that Offred describes.
“Kate” kills her Commander with (IIRC) a butcher knife.
The whole film looked cheaply made. Bad sets, bad costumes, mildly bad acting.