WE were warned in 1985 and in 2017 and we are being warned again in 2026. THE 2026 Midterm elections can be the beginning of restoring our democratic Republic. Please go to Rock the Vote to confirm you are registered to vote and all the information is correct and then please vote on 3 November 2026.
She was sitting in a walled city, surrounded by the sound of deliberate sonic booms, reading the newspaper and taking notes.
It was the spring of 1984, and Margaret Atwood had rented a typewriter in West Berlin. The Berlin Wall encircled the city on all sides. Every Sunday, the East German Air Force sent jets screaming overhead — not for any military purpose, but as a reminder. The Soviet Empire was watching. It was always watching. Elderly women who had survived the Second World War walked the streets without speaking much. Young men hid in the city to avoid military conscription elsewhere. West Berlin was a small island of the West sitting inside a totalitarian sea, and you could feel the pressure of that arrangement in the air.
Margaret Atwood was writing about a future in which women lost everything.
She had given herself one rule before she began, and she intended to keep it without exception: nothing would go into the book that had not already happened somewhere, at some time, to real people. No invented horrors. No atrocities she had imagined from nothing. Every single dark thing in her dystopia had to have a precedent in documented human history.
So she began collecting.
She cut newspaper articles and filed them in binders. Pieces about infant mortality rates. Reports from Romania, where the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had banned abortion and contraception and ordered women to produce children in service of the state. Stories about Soviet women losing ground in the workforce as the political climate shifted. News from American states where abortion access was being restricted. Headlines about baby stealing, forced surrogacy, missing children, women losing property rights they had only recently gained.
She did not call it research. She was, she would later say, just reading the news.
The novel had begun as a question she could not put down: if someone wanted to reverse every right women had gained — property ownership, employment, bank accounts, bodily autonomy — how would it be done? What would the mechanism look like?
The answer, she found, was not complicated. You would reverse the steps that had produced the freedom, one by one, in the right order. You would justify each reversal with safety, or morality, or the protection of family. You would make each step seem reasonable before the next one began.
In her dystopia, women were sorted by function and color-coded by clothing — a system with direct precedents in Renaissance sumptuary laws and Calvinist dress codes. Women who could bear children became handmaids, their bodies the legal property of the state. The handmaid system itself was drawn from the Lebensborn program in Nazi Germany, where SS officers maintained biological wives to produce what the regime considered racially desirable children. The public executions in the novel came from the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. The stolen children given to commanders' families came from Argentina's Dirty War, in which military officers took infants from political dissidents they had murdered. The surveillance, the careful speech, the way people changed the subject when someone who might be listening came too close — Margaret was living all of that in West Berlin in 1984, in a city that understood what it meant to exist under eyes that never closed.
She finished the manuscript in early 1985, moving between Berlin and Canada and Alabama to complete it. She titled it The Handmaid's Tale.
When it was published in August of that year, critics called it a feminist 1984. Some praised the imagination behind it. Others dismissed it as paranoid, as overwrought, as the kind of book that mistakes anxiety for prophecy. One of the common refrains was that nothing like this could happen in modern America.
Margaret kept her newspaper clippings.
The book became a bestseller and won awards and was taught in schools and then banned from schools, sometimes the same schools that had assigned it. Parents objected to the sexual content, the treatment of religion, the political argument beneath the story. The objections themselves were a kind of evidence she had not been looking for but could not ignore.
For decades the novel lived in that particular category of books that are considered important warnings about somewhere else, some other time, some other kind of society — not here, not now, not us.
Then 2016 arrived and something shifted.
Hulu announced a television adaptation. The series premiered in April 2017, three months after a new administration took office in Washington with explicit intentions to reshape the country, the same month that states began passing laws restricting abortion access, the same month that women in many places felt, in a way that was difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore, that something was moving in a direction that had a name.
The show became a cultural phenomenon. But it was what happened outside of the screen that no one had anticipated.
Women began appearing at political protests dressed in the handmaids' red robes and white bonnets. They stood in silence, in rows, outside the Texas Capitol while lawmakers debated abortion restrictions inside. They appeared at Senate confirmation hearings. They marched in Washington and Buenos Aires and London. The costume from a novel that critics had once called paranoid became the uniform of real political resistance in multiple countries simultaneously.
A warning dressed as fiction had become a language that real people used to describe what they felt was actually happening.
In June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional protection for abortion access that had stood for nearly fifty years, search traffic for The Handmaid's Tale rose by six thousand percent. The book, written in 1984, became the number one bestseller again — thirty-seven years after its original publication. Women who had never read it, or who had read it and filed it away as a period piece, were suddenly searching to understand whether it was a prediction.
Margaret Atwood, by then in her eighties, gave the same answer she had been giving since 1985.
She had not made anything up. It had already happened. She had simply remembered.
The newspaper clippings from 1984 and 1985 are stored in boxes at the University of Toronto archives. Researchers who examine them report a consistent and unsettling experience: the headlines feel current. The stories about reproductive rights, about women losing economic standing, about children separated from parents — the dates say 1985. The content reads like this week.
In 2019 she published The Testaments, a sequel that won the Booker Prize. By then she had stopped needing to defend the plausibility of her fictional world. She was watching pieces of it arrive.
What Margaret Atwood understood in that walled city in 1984, sitting with her binders of newspaper clippings, was something that most people find genuinely difficult to hold in their minds: dystopia does not announce itself. It does not arrive with villains explaining their intentions. It moves slowly, through restrictions framed as protections, through curtailments framed as safety measures, through the patient reversal of freedoms one at a time until the reversals feel normal.
And it is never new. It is always a return to something that already happened, somewhere, to people who also believed it could not happen to them.
She was forty-four years old in 1984 when she wrote a warning and disguised it as a novel, following a rule that nothing in it could be invented — that every horror had to be borrowed from history because history had already provided more than enough.
The terrifying part, she has said more than once, was never that she predicted the future.
It was that she never had to.
For those who believe that the most important warnings are the ones we dismiss as exaggerated until we suddenly cannot — what piece of history do you think the present moment most urgently needs to remember?
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