After staging an attack killing the president of the United States and most of Congress, a radical political group called the "Sons of Jacob" uses theonomic ideology to launch a revolution.

The story is told in first-person narration by a woman named Offred, a criminal guilty of trying to escape to Canada with a forged passport alongside her husband and 5-year-old daughter; she is also considered an adulterer for being married to a divorced man.

Women are classed socially and follow a strict dress code, ranked highest to lowest: the Commanders' Wives in sky blue, their unmarried daughters in white, the Handmaids in red with highly visible large white bonnets, the Aunts (who train and indoctrinate the Handmaids) in brown, the Marthas (cooks and maids, possibly unmarried sterile women past child-bearing years) in green, Econowives (the wives of lower-ranking men who handle everything in the domestic sphere) in blue, red and green stripes, and widows in black.

At her new home, she is treated poorly by the Commander's wife, Serena Joy, a former Christian media personality who supported women's domesticity and subordinate role well before Gilead was established.

To Offred's surprise, the Commander asks to see her outside of the "Ceremony", ritualized rape conducted during the Handmaids’ likely fertile period each month, with the wives present, intended to result in conception.

Offred unexpectedly encounters an emotionally-broken Moira there, who tells her that those found breaking the law are sent to the "Colonies" to clean up toxic waste or are allowed to work as Jezebels as punishment.

In the days between her visits to the Commander, Offred also learns her shopping partner, a woman called Ofglen, is with the Mayday resistance, an underground network working to overthrow Gilead's government.

The male keynote speaker explains that Offred's narrative was originally recorded on a set of audio cassettes, a technology roughly 200 years out of date at that time, and later transcribed by historians.

He also comments on the difficulty of authenticating the account, due to how few records have survived from the early years of Gilead's existence, and speculates on the eventual fates of Offred and her acquaintances.

Her motivation for writing the novel was her belief that in the 1980s, the religious right was discussing what they would do with/to women if they took power, including the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and the Ronald Reagan administration.

[15] Atwood has explained that The Handmaid's Tale is a response to those who say the oppressive, totalitarian, and religious governments that have taken hold in other countries throughout the years "can't happen here"—but in this work, she has tried to show how such a takeover might play out.

[20] Due to the totalitarian nature of Gileadean society, Atwood, in creating the setting, drew from the "utopian idealism" present in 20th-century régimes, such as Cambodia and Romania, as well as earlier New England Puritanism.

Atwood's strong stance on environmental issues and their negative consequences for our society has presented itself in other works such as her MaddAddam trilogy, and refers back to her growing up with biologists and her own scientific curiosity.

Offred is told that when Ofglen vanishes, it is because she has committed suicide before the government can take her into custody due to her membership in the resistance, possibly to avoid giving away any information.

She also writes an autobiography of her life, which she hides in a copy of Cardinal John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua in the restricted section of the Ardua Hall library.

Complex dress codes play a key role in imposing social control within the new society and serve to distinguish people by sex, occupation, and caste.

[10] Bruce Miller, the creator and executive producer of The Handmaid's Tale television serial, declared with regard to Atwood's book, as well as his series, that Gilead is "a society that's based kind of in a perverse misreading of Old Testament laws and codes".

However, in the epilogue, Professor Pieixoto reveals that many of the emigrating Jews ended up being dumped into the sea while on the ships ostensibly tasked with transporting them to Israel, due to privatization of the "repatriation program" and capitalists' effort to maximize profits.

[12][failed verification] Atwood maintains that the Republic of Gilead is only an extrapolation of trends already seen in the United States at the time of her writing, a view supported by other scholars studying The Handmaid's Tale.

[38] Many have placed The Handmaid's Tale in the same category of dystopian fiction as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World,[15] a categorization that Atwood has accepted and reiterated in many articles and interviews.

For example, Mary McCarthy's 1986 New York Times review argued that The Handmaid's Tale lacked the "surprised recognition" necessary for readers to see "our present selves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue".

[25] The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist dystopian novel,[39][40] combining the characteristics of dystopian fiction: "a genre that projects an imaginary society that differs from the author's own, first, by being significantly worse in important respects and second by being worse because it attempts to reify some utopian ideal",[41] with the feminist utopian ideal which: "sees men or masculine systems as the major cause of social and political problems (e.g. war), and presents women as not only at least the equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions".

[45] In 1985, reviewers hailed the book as a "feminist 1984",[46] citing similarities between the totalitarian regimes under which both protagonists live, and "the distinctively modern sense of nightmare come true, the initial paralyzed powerlessness of the victim unable to act".

"[50] Atwood's novels, and especially her works of speculative fiction, The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, are frequently offered as examples for the final, open-ended question on the American Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition exam each year.

[15][16] Some scholars have offered a feminist interpretation, connecting Atwood's use of religious fundamentalism in the pages of The Handmaid's Tale to a condemnation of its presence in current American society.

She then makes the connection to the relationship between Offred, Serena Joy, and the Commander, explaining that through this "perversion of traditional marriage, the Biblical story of Rachel, Jacob, and Bilhah is taken too literally".

The powers that be in Gilead legitimize their rule through the extensive use of propaganda, much as Plato's rulers ensure co-operation on the part of the public by propagating a noble lie.

Lamey argues that such allusions, rather than satirizing the philosophies in question, see Gilead employ a practice frequently used by actual dictatorships, that of seeking to bolster their prestige and legitimacy by twisting ideas already in circulation to suit their own ends.

Ana Cottle characterized The Handmaid's Tale as "White feminism", noting that Atwood does away with Black people in a few lines by relocating the "Children of Ham" while borrowing heavily from the African-American experience and applying it to White women, specifically Gilead's explicit anti-literacy laws, which was borrowed from real life anti-literacy campaigns in the United States, alongside the removal of surnames among handmaids, an ode to how enslaved Africans were not given last names until Emancipation.

Converts who were subsequently discovered with any symbolic representations or artifacts of Judaism were executed, and the repatriation scheme was privatized, with the result that many Jews died en route to Israel.