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Handmaid's Tale


Elizabeth Moss and Madeline Brewer on Handmaid's Tale (2017-2020)

Handmaid's Tale depicts dystopian alternate history where the American Civil War lasted longer, until 1944 when Huey Long's forces used biological and chemical warfare against Combined Syndicates of America and her allies. After his deat on 1945, his direct successor William Dudley Pelley withdrew American Union State from international politics, privatized Northern industry, giving it to the web of monopolist cartels ruled by heavy-handed industrialists, expanded Jim Crow laws to the North and began passing anti-feminist laws that severed women rights' in the state. Nuclear war that happened on 1962 left large swaths of country irradiated and people's fertility began to fall. On 1980s Old Testament Christian group calling themselves the Sons of Jacob seized the power in AUS, imprisoned all fertile women and made them breeding slaves for highest men in the religion. In a new American state, woman could not read, write, leave a home without male relative, had to cover her head and be submissive for her husband. Few fertile women are brutally subjugated by the regime, assigned to the homes of the ruling class where they are ritually raped by their male masters to become pregnant and bear children for masters and their wives. All women who did have significant political or scientifical positions are forced to work in secret brothels for the Sons of Jacob elite. Handmaids are named after their masters (Offred, Ofglen, Ofjames) and forced to never use their birth name again under severe punishment if they fail.


Series ends in a brutal revolution where all vestiges of the old system are destroyed by the Handmaids and other repressed women.​

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