SOURCE: “Atwood Woman,” in Nation, May 31, 1986, pp. 764-7.

In the following review, Stimpson offers a positive analysis of The Handmaid's Tale.

Politics, Margaret Atwood once said, means “who is entitled to do what to whom, with impunity; who profits by it; and who therefore eats what.” The Handmaid's Tale proves that Atwood is among the most telling political writers in the West today. Simply put, The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist dystopia. Atwood transmogrifies the Cambridge, Massachusetts, of the late twentieth century into the capital of a monotheocracy, the Republic of Gilead, a nasty piece of work. Its fundamentalist founders have pulled off a bloody coup d'état. They have replaced the Constitution with the overweening patriarchal principles of Genesis. Gilead expels Jews and blacks. It compels rigid gender roles. White women have no money, education or civil rights. However, ladies of the elite get to lord it...