In English 1A, we read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It depicts a totalitarian society in what used to be part of the United States. Gilead is ruled by a fundamentalist regime that treats women as property of the state, and is faced with environmental disasters and a plummeting birth rate. In a desperate attempt to repopulate a devastated world, the few remaining fertile women are forced into sexual servitude. One of these women, Offred, is determined to survive the terrifying world she lives in, and find the daughter that was taken from her.
.After completing The Handmaid's Tale, we worked on presentations revolving around the book's central theme of a dystopian society. All of us were given different topics which we had to connect to the idea of dystopia and examples of it in the real world. My topic was on the environmental effects of Hurricane Harvey and the result of chemical plant explosions in the Houston area. We then had to complete our Get Woke Essays, which we had to connect and write about broader examples, to finish up our Handmaid's section of the class.