However, I thought reviewers of both the book and the movie missed the boat when they compared them to other science fiction. Even Mary McCarthy, who reviewed the novel for The New York Times, complained that it wasn’t as frightening as Nineteen Eighty-Four or A Clockwork Orange. Since the role of critics is to put creative works in context, they could have explained that pretty much everything Atwood describes has already happened somewhere. After all, to control the number of workers and soldiers, maintain divisions of race, caste, or class into the future, and make sure that the patriarchal family keeps right on normalizing other hierarchies—all require controlling women’s bodies.

The bottom line is that men have to control the one thing they don’t have: wombs.

….

Women’s bodies are a place of birth all right—the birthplace of democracy—yet I’ve never seen a political text that starts there.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a rare book, and the only novel I know, that portrays reproductive freedom as the basis of everything else.