n society, or a utopian society that does not work and does not serve the interests of the majority of its population. The novel is narrated by its protagonist, a young woman known as Offred who has been kidnapped by her government and separated from her husband and child. She is forced into slavery as a Handmaid, or surrogate mother, for a powerful couple that cannot have children of their own. This story is set in a future where such arrangements have become commonplace. Atwood develops here a vision of the place of women in society and uses an extreme situation to comment on the secondary position women occupy in Western society today.
The dystopia envisioned by Atwood is an example of the biological determinism referred to by Bem:
The sociobiological analysis of both sexual
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