Gender roles and sexual power politics are central themes in the novel. The Republic of Gilead is a vehicle for Atwood’s social criticism of tendencies in the 1980s (e.g. the backlash against liberal reforms such as reproductive rights and gender equality).

The protagonist’s former life seems like a utopian dream to her, but Atwood intends us to see that there are similarities between the two worlds. The dystopia exaggerates aspects of our contemporary society which might otherwise be difficult to discern as negative (because we are so familiar with them). The narrator’s memories reveal that women’s freedom also then was limited. Women’s freedom of movement was, for instance, limited by the constant threat of rape, Luke shows some subtle misogynist tendencies, women objectified themselves and tried to conform to beauty ideals, etc.

Atwood’s main focus is the oppression and objectification of women. She presents women as trapped by their sex and reduced from subjecthood to function. They are reduced to their fertility, treated as nothing more than a set of ovaries and a womb. “We are two-legged wombs, that’s all,” Offred says. 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.

The functions women can hold in Gilead mirror the domestic roles women traditionally have held through history, but are more institutionalized, even to the extent of different colored clothes for the different functions. This means that men no longer have to relate to women as complex individuals, but merely as embodiments of ideas; “wife,” “whore,” “domestic servant” or “child producer”. This allows men to concentrate on their own feelings and needs. In this way, Atwood reveals how the objectification of women gives men power. The color/uniform requirements are examples of how the regime attempts to erase the difference between the role and the individual woman. The handmaids do not even have an individual name, but are labeled as possessions of their commander; Offred, Ofwarren, etc. (This may remind the reader of the way women in our society take their husband’s last name, and children their father’s.)

Gilead sees gender as the most important trait in a person. Women in Gilead have been stripped of all liberties and placed under the guardianship of a man. They have also been reduced to their biological functions as childbearers and denied any freedom or rights. Men and women are segregated, and women are confined to a domestic/private sphere. According to the regime, this is the natural and God-given role for women in society, and therefore also a role that will fulfill their needs/that suits their natures. Offred’s intelligence, as well as her pain, makes the reader feel that Offred’s new role is anything but natural or good. Even the commander’s wife is unhappy and seems to feel trapped in the role she used to advocate for. Men are also categorized and defined by their sex: “Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, not much more. (…) It’s nature’s way. It’s God’s device”. But Offred challenges this simplistic view of men: “But how to fit the Commander into this, (…) with his word games and his desire for what? To be played with, to be gently kissed, as if I meant it,” she asks herself.

Atwood suggests that gender roles are constructed/false. "My self is a thing I must compose, as one composed a speech. What I must present as a made thing, not something born” (p. 76), Offred says, drawing attention to the false nature of Gilead’s different roles. However, she reveals that she also “composed” her self/identity in the past: “We were revisionists,” she says, “what we revised was ourselves” (239). The idea of women promoted in commercial magazines was the recipe. Offred’s identity in the past was partly shaped by the ideas attached to her biological sex.

Yet another aspect of Atwood’s criticism suggests that men connect sex and power. The commander seems to be turned on by power, by being looked up to and by the difficulty of the chase. He complains that in the past “the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for” (221). In her relationship with the commander, Offred is aware that she is entertainment to him, and that she is expendable (can be exchanged): “For him, I must remember, I am only a whim” (168). He laughs at Offred using butter as moisturizer, showing how insensitive he is to her situation. He flaunts his power by breaking the rules and wants to see that Offred is grateful for freedoms he allows her. Offred says that her total subjugation has removed the “animosity [she] used to sense in men, even in Luke sometimes” (193). Atwood does not claim that men are born with this need to feel more powerful, however. The commander seems to have internalized a role he has been taught. Offred comments on his “studied pose, something of the country squire, some old come-on from a glossy men’s mag” (147).

The novel criticizes the belief that women are born with a specific set of traits (innate qualities) that clearly define the female gender (as the diametric opposite of men). Instead of such an “essentialist/biological view of gender”, gender roles are presented as something that we learn, as cultural constructs, as context-dependent. There is no simple division between masculine and feminine qualities: both men and women are capable of violence, e.g. the aunts who re-educate women back into traditional gender roles.

The women in the novel are, in fact, not happy in their new situations (and neither are the men).

The novel criticizes the political apathy of so many young women in the 1980s and suggests that by ignoring sexism they contributed to the rise to power of the extreme right wing. It is clear that Offred blames herself/women for colluding in their own suppression when she says: “We lived as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it” (p.66). Women’s collusion in their own oppression consists partly of taking the gains their mothers acquired for them through the women’s liberation movement for granted. Our friend remembers how she and her past life so the struggle for equality as successful, and no longer necessary. She laughs at her mother’s feminism and at Moira who writes an essay on date rape. We also see how she made an active effort to ignore sexism in favor of love and acceptance from men. She pretends to laugh with Luke at Serena Joy’s television sermons about how women should stay at home: “We thought she was funny. Or Luke thought she was funny, I only pretended to think so. Really she was a little frightening” (56). Her laughter is a way of signaling that she does not pose a threat. She does not want to be seen as a feminist. (Simone de Beauvoir points out that heterosexual women’s oppression is complex - love and marriage tie them to the gender that oppresses them. Offred’s psychology reveals how central sexual desire and love is to human motivation. After her love affair with Nick has started, she no longer dreams of escaping Gilead. Like her mother said, it’s “amazing what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations” (283). (What is the significance of Offred’s comments about the mistress of a nazi who ran a concentration camp (p. 154-154)?).

Ideological hardlines/absolute truths/black and white divisions are criticized in the novel. Gilead’s absolutism leaves no room for choice, freedom, variety, individuality, emotion or love. This is true for both men and women. There is even a critique of certain feminist ideologies, e.g. Offred’s mother; a radical feminist who takes part in book burnings; this act is symbolically presented as an act of violence: Offred remembers imagining that it is “parts of women’s bodies” they were burning (49). The chanting and ecstatic facial expressions of her mother’s friends when they are burning pornography is described in a way that brings to mind the zeal of the brainwashed in Gilead. The imagery used in the scene is intended to make us aware of the danger of strategies like censorship. Also, her mother dreamt of a women’s society, but her rhetoric of sisterhood has backfired.