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I first read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the late 1980s when I was in high school. It alarmed me on the first reading, scared me on the second, and, as I continued to re-read it over and over again that year, made me downright paranoid. It was, after all, the ‘80s and, while the religious right wasn’t born that decade, it had become significantly more high profile during the Reagan years. As a teenager reading The Handmaid’s Tale, the notion of a society taken over by fundamentalists who categorically stripped all of women’s rights did not seem hard to imagine.
