when the Gileadean revolutionaries take over they fire all women from their jobs and drain their bank accounts, leaving Offred desperate and dependent

Luke isn't bothered - even good men have embedded mysogynistic attitudes

'Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?'

'I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.'

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.

'But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.'

'A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get.' - Aunt Lydia

'You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.'

“Why expect one woman to carry out all the functions necessary to the serene running of a household? It isn’t reasonable or humane. Your daughters will have greater freedom.” - Aunt Lydia

'He doesn’t mind this, I thought. He doesn’t mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other’s, anymore. Instead, I am his.'

Gileadean women find all liberties taken from them, from the right to choose their clothes to the right to read.

shows that the feminist left, as exemplified by Offred’s mother, is not the solution, as the radical feminists, too, advocate book burnings, censorship, and violence

even women in power are not trusted, Aunt Lydia only allowed a cattle-prod not a gun

The Commander’s Wife, once a powerful supporter of far right-wing religious ideas about how women should stay in the home, now finds herself unhappily trapped in the world she advocated for

institutionalizes sexual violence toward women - the ceremony, Jezebel's

'Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?'

'I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed'

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.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.

'I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.'

'A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get'

But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe none of this is about control…maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.

“Why expect one woman to carry out all the functions necessary to the serene running of a household? It isn’t reasonable or humane. Your daughters will have greater freedom.”

Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light

We must be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadean. Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific…our job is not to censure but to understand.”