"Farming" Our "National Resource"
After drinking about 300,000 different chemicals from water, and being affected by a great deal of radiation, our male sterility is on the increase and so are spontaneous miscarriages and birth defects. Our Gilead society was formed in response to the crisis caused by dramatically decreased birthrates. The state’s entire structure is built around a single goal: control of reproduction. For sure, this is a society in which you have a sort of "farming" of women. The women who are still capable of bearing children are taken as Handmaids and assigned to the homes of wealthy, powerful men; the commanders. These Handmaids are used only for the purposes of breeding. They are forbidden to vote, hold property or jobs, read, or do anything else that might allow them to become subversive or independent and thereby undermine their husbands or the state.
Well, pretty much like this.
In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood reveals the fact that women in our society are treated as subhuman. True, in Gilead, they are reduced to their
fertility, treated as nothing more than a set of ovaries and a womb. In one of
the novel’s key scenes, Offred lies in the bath and reflects that, before
Gilead, she considered her body an instrument of her desires; now, she is just a
mound of flesh surrounding a womb that must be filled in order to make her
useful. Offred's thought reflects the fact that we are using women's bodies as political instruments. Our state of Gilead seeks to deprive women of their individuality in order to make
them docile carriers of the next generation.
