What inspired the outfits in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"

In the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library successful Toronto, Canada, Margaret Atwood, award-winning dystopian fabrication author, fished retired an nonfiction from a probe folder.

"Women forced to person babies," Wertheim work aloud from a quality clipping.

"Communists are making women person babies," Atwood clarified. "'Persistent non-pregnancy volition beryllium considered a transgression against the state,'" she quoted from an aged quality communicative astir Romania.

Atwood has stacks of probe for her novels successful these archives. She writes by a strict rule: if it didn't happen, somewhere, astatine immoderate time, it doesn't marque it into the plots of her stories.

That regularisation applied to Atwood's astir celebrated work, "The Handmaid's Tale," published successful 1985, and aboriginal turned into an Emmy award-winning tv bid for Hulu. 

Atwood told Wertheim determination were respective ways into the story, but an inciting lawsuit came successful 1981, conscionable aft erstwhile President Ronald Reagan was elected for the office.

"And this was the infinitesimal astatine which the spiritual close was getting organized arsenic a governmental force," she told Wertheim. 

"This person said to me, 'Have you heard what they're saying?'... and 1 of the visions was that women should beryllium backmost successful the home." 

This moment, Atwood explained, besides coincided with an accrued information of women successful the workforce.

"My question to myself was: present that they're each moving astir having recognition cards and jobs, however are you going to get them backmost into the home?"

Atwood cited George Orwell arsenic an power too, saying, "I had work '1984' arsenic a precise young teen and been highly impressed by it."

Wertheim asked astir the now-iconic reddish cloaks and bonnets that person go a azygous of governmental absorption successful the Trump era.

"Well, if you person a cult, and if you [have] totalitarianism, you person to person outfits," Atwood told 60 Minutes.

The bonnet-and-cloak outfit was mostly inspired by a tin of Old Dutch cleaning solution. 

"The Old Dutch Cleanser container of the 1940s traumatized maine arsenic a child. So, it shows a pistillate whose look is covered by this bonnet, holding a instrumentality and chasing something… beauteous scary," she told Wertheim. 

The Old Dutch Cleanser packaging that inspired the outfits for Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." Apic / Getty Images

"For the 'Wives,' it would beryllium blue, which was the Virgin Mary color," Atwood told 60 Minutes. "[But] for the handmaids, it would beryllium red, which is the Mary Magdalene and 'Scarlet Letter' color."

Atwood is simply a pupil of government, powerfulness and the overreaches of both. 

She wrote overmuch of "The Handmaid's Tale" connected a rented typewriter successful 1984 West Berlin. In her ventures to the Eastern Bloc, she witnessed policing, paranoia and the lack of freedom. 

Atwood made Harvard University a cardinal determination for the dystopian nine successful "The Handmaid's Tale." She knows Cambridge well: she was a grad pupil determination successful the 1960s. 

"It was close successful the bosom of what radical believed– successful the 80s, 70s, and 60s, and 50s– what they believed America to be. And what they believed it to beryllium was the antithesis of the USSR," she told 60 Minutes. 

"I was precise funny successful totalitarianism and I was precise funny successful however they get that way…I didn't similar proceeding radical say, 'It can't hap present [at Harvard].' Because thing tin hap anyplace fixed the circumstances."

"All of the details from 'The Handmaid's Tale' [are] from different countries, different times… they're each real, and I enactment them close successful the bosom of wide America," she told Wertheim.

Atwood wrote 1 of 2 dedications successful "The Handmaid's Tale" to a 17th period pistillate named Mary Webster, a.k.a. "Half-Hanged Mary."

Like galore different women during that clip successful New England, she was wrongfully accused of witchcraft and sentenced to decease by hanging. 

"[She was] taken to Boston, was enactment connected trial, got exonerated… but the townspeople didn't similar the verdict and strung her up anyway," Atwood explained. 

"[They] came successful the greeting to chopped down the body, and she was inactive alive… I expect if they thought that she was a witch earlier this event, they truly thought truthful afterwards. But they didn't bent her again. And she lived different 14 years."

"You traced this. This was a relative?" Wertheim asked. 

"On Mondays, my grandma said it was [a relative]," Atwood said.

"And connected Wednesdays, erstwhile she was feeling much respectable, she would accidental that she wasn't truthful sure."'

The video supra was primitively published connected November 9, 2025. It was produced by Will Croxton and edited by Nelson Ryland.