I Only Read the Cliffs Notes
My Essay on the Handmaid's Tale & Modern Day America
My daughter’s last assignment for her Literature of Social Criticism class (which was also the very last assignment of her junior year in high school) was an essay on The Handmaid’s Tale. She compared women’s lack of reproductive freedom in Margaret Atwood’s fictional Gilead and women’s lack of reproductive freedom in the United States, a comparison which the Supreme Court made a hell of a lot easier last year at this time.
I’d read the book when I was in high school but remembered very little of it and refused to watch the Hulu series when it premiered early in Trump’s presidency. I remember almost everything that has happened to me in real life (down to what I was wearing when it happened), but my recall for books and movies has always been terrible. (My recall of what I’ve written is not a lot better, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve already explained this.) I didn’t even remember that the servant women were called Marthas which should have stuck with me for obvious reasons.
So, as she was writing, I went to the SparkNotes (what happened to Cliff?) and refreshed my memory in a way that would have been cheating if I were the student. The 1985 novel is set in the United States after a coup by religious extremists who were worried about shrinking fertility rates caused by toxic air and soil. Since they’ve taken over, women have lost all of their independence and been divided into groups based on their age, social standing, and—most importantly—ability to reproduce.
Our heroine is a handmaid called Offred (handmaids are the property of their commanders and hers is named Fred). Through her eyes we learn that the US is now a country in which women have no rights (some are not even allowed to read or write). Through her flashbacks of life before, we learn how we got here. This quote about how the new theocratic government took over really got me:
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe, the entire government gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
There have been many moments (and I’m not just talking about January 6th) in the past few years where it feels like someone has suspended the constitution, and the new composition of the Supreme Court suggests this will not change anytime soon.
One of the things that I had forgotten about the book was the indoctrination that the handmaids were given to get them to not just accept but embrace their new life without any freedom. The re-education is conducted by women of higher social status (called Aunts) and is Biblically based (though according to a SparkNotes analysis the women in charge use a deliberately skewed interpretation of The Bible).
This too feels unsettlingly familiar: the women of Fox News—rife with the privilege of their white skin and blonde hair and brightly colored suits—telling other women that life is going to be better in this post-Roe world in which women in half of the country don’t get to decide what to do with their own bodies.
This was the message a couple of weeks ago when Turning Point USA threw its annual Young Women’s Leadership Summit at the Gaylord Hotel in Grapevine, Texas. The theme was the 1970s. Outwardly this meant wearing your best groovy bell bottoms and go-go boots. Politically it meant just the opposite: heading back to the days pre-sexual revolution when women dressed primly with matching gloves and handbags that they could only buy if their father or husband said yes because women couldn’t get credit cards in their own name until 1974.
The 200-or-so attendees—teens and 20-something women sometimes accompanied by their mothers—were treated to a line-up of who’s who in MAGA America. Speakers included Lara Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, Candace Owens, Laura Ingraham, and Kari Lake as well as a number of Christian influencers and podcast hosts.
The opening speech was given by Alex Clark, who hosts a few podcasts for Turning Point USA. She tied her remarks back to the theme by saying, “In the ’70s, women were given all sorts of lies. They just told us, ‘Well, you can be a man.’ And I guess we’ve kind of accomplished that. But are we happier?” She went on to say:
What I’m here to tell you is, if you were to just go back to biblical roots in what God had designed for women to do, we will be happier.
Clark blamed much of the problem on birth control. Apparently, she has a conspiracy theory in which Big Pharma gets teens hooked on the pill and keeps them on it for too long so that eventually they will need to pay Big Pharma for fertility treatments. It’s a cunning plan really except for the fact that birth control isn’t addictive and doesn’t actually cause infertility later in life.
Clark then went on to add daycare to her list of modern ills. According to her, it raises cortisol levels in children, creates disordered attachments later in life, and is part of the false narrative that foolishly told women they could have a career and a family. (An article in MediaMatters notes that this point didn’t resonate with the audience, so much so that after an awkward pause, Clark said, “It just got real uncomfy. Did you feel that shift?”)
The theme of Clark’s speech which was repeated throughout the whole conferences was essentially “Sorry kid, you can’t have it all, so it’s better to just want a family.”
It’s worth noting that Clark seems to have chosen career over family as she’s childless at 30 (an age that other speakers made clear was too late). A version of this hypocrisy is true of all of the women who took the stage and told versions of their younger selves to think smaller. Some speakers had children and some didn’t, but all had impressive resumes and careers that are clearly important to them. And yet here they were promising the next generation that having fewer ambitions would be better.
It all—especially the parts about what God wants for women—sounds like something Aunt Lydia would say. In the novel she is one of Gilead’s indoctrinators who, among other things, insists her students gang up on a fellow handmaid who had been raped by telling her over and over again that it was her fault. Aunt Lydia promises the handmaids that their new life as a reproductive slave will be better. Atwood writes:
“There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”
The men who spoke at the conference had similar messages about appreciating the safety of marriage. Benny Johnson, also a Turning Point USA podcaster, told the young women to behave well so they could find a man. He went on to say, “There ain’t nothing wrong with being a trad wife. Being a trad wife’s based. Men love this.”
If you need that translated for you, you’re not alone. A “trad wife” is a shorthand for a traditional wife who presumably stays homes, does dishes, vacuums in pearls, and obeys her “dudeservative” husband. (Though Benny’s own wife seems to work. She is known to this audience as Nurse Kate, has 78,000 Instagram followers, and gave a workshop about beauty standards post-pregnancy which I’m betting I didn’t live up to.) “Based” is a slang term that means being yourself and not caring what other people think. I wonder if Benny knows this, but based has its roots in “basehead” which was a 1980s term from someone addicted to crack and it made its way back into the vernacular in a 2007 song by rapper Lil B.
While Aunt Lydia also preached austerity and chastised the old order for its focus on material goods, Turning Point USA loves material goods. It’s exhibit hall featured a roster of anti-woke brands giving away swag and selling everything from makeup to tampons. (What does an anti-woke tampon look like?) Participants could also leave with a picture of themselves “in a mirror made to look like a magazine cover with a headline that reads, Birth control is so last year.”
Sadly, much of the conference focused on anti-trans sentiment and continually tried to drum up hatred against transwomen who are, according to various speakers, wearing dresses just so they can take over women’s sports and ruining what it means to be a woman. (To be clear, the actual quotes are way worse than my paraphrasing). This is not surprising. Like the rest of the GOP, the speakers know they have little to offer their followers in terms of real solutions. In an entire conference about going back to a “traditional” family structure, for example, no one discussed the fact that most couples can’t afford to live on one income. Without solutions, the Christian Conservative playbook calls for seeding hatred and blaming someone else. (In a fun twist, a huge pride flag flew outside the building and hotel management refused to take it down despite the organizers’ demands.)
I want to thank the journalists who sat through days of this bullshit (presumably without once yelling “that’s not how it f**king works” in a crowded ballroom). I read articles by Kara Voght of the Washington Post, Madeline Peltz and Jacinda Hollins-Borges of MediaMatters, and Laura Jadeed for the New Republic. All of them noted an exchange between Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, and a college student in the audience. The student explained that she wants to be an orthopedic surgeon and asked Kirk if he had advice for someone who wants to get married and have kids but won’t be in a position to settle down until she’s 30. Kirk replied: “You’re going to have to choose which one matters more. There are a lot of successful 35-year-old orthopedic surgeons that have cats and not kids, and they’re very miserable.”
The high school junior in my house also has dreams of being a surgeon and I can’t imagine telling her that those dreams are incompatible with being happy. (Also, she’s not allowed to get a cat: her mother is allergic.)
I’m sad for the women who attended because they don’t seem to see the ways in which they are being disempowered. I’m furious at the women who spoke because they are deliberately disempowering other women. (I can’t understand perpetuating a belief system that doesn’t actually value your opinion.) And I’m scared for our country because between the rule-less Trump presidency, the pandemic, the climate crisis, the loss of abortion rights, the book banning trend, the vicious attacks on the trans community, and the stories of women being denied health care because their fetus has a “heartbeat,” Gilead is looking less and less farfetched every day.