As Gilead was formed in response to the crisis caused by dramatically decreased birth-rates, the state's entire structure, with its religious trappings and rigid political hierarchy, is built around a single goal: control of reproduction.
“No woman in her right mind, these days, would seek to prevent a birth”
The state tackles the problem head-on by assuming complete control of women's bodies through their political overthrow. Women cannot vote, hold property or jobs, read, or do anything else that might allow them to become rebellious or independent and thereby undermine their husbands or the state.
Despite all of Gilead's pro-women rhetoric, such subjugation creates a society in which women are treated as subhuman. They are reduced to their fertility, treated as nothing more than a set of ovaries and a womb.
“I used to think of my body as an instrument of pleasure…..”
“…..I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object”
Offred lies in the bath and reflects that, before Gilead, she considered her body an instrument of her desires; now, she is just a mound of flesh surrounding a womb that must be filled in order to make her useful. Gilead seeks to deprive women of their individuality in order to make them trained carriers of the next generation. The central object is her womb, which is the only part of a woman that matters in Gilead. Offred's musings show that she has internalised Gilead's attitude toward women, which treats them not as individuals but as objects important only for the children that they can bear. Women's wombs are a “national resource,” the state insists, using language that dehumanises women and reduces them to, as Offred puts it,
“a cloud, congealed around a central object, which is hard and more real than I am.”
This idea that only the womb matters gets reinforced when Offred remembers Aunt Lydia's saying...
“For our purposes your feet and hands are not essential”
Aunt Lydia implies that only the wombs matter, and other body parts can safely be flayed and beaten. Pain and emotion do not matter; only childbearing does.
When Janine tells the story of her gang-rape at the age of fourteen, the group, at Aunt Lydia's prompting, chants that the rape was Janine's fault, that she led them on, that God allowed the rape to happen in order to teach Janine a lesson.
“Teach her a lesson”
This incident illustrates the way Gilead turns women against women. Testifying is a powerful way of breaking women, for they are blamed not by their oppressors, men, but by their fellows in oppression, women. The effectiveness of the group condemnation becomes clear when Offred relates that the next week, Janine said without prompting that the rape was her fault because she led them on. These women are coerced into condemning their peer, because they know they will be punished if they do not. Horribly, however, they begin to enjoy the condemnation. When they call Janine a crybaby, Offred says, “We meant it, which was the bad part.” They despise her weakness, and for a moment they truly believe the ideology Aunt Lydia feeds them.
“The Handmaid's Tale” explores the misogynistic treatment of women, carried out in the name of God but in large part motivated by a desire to control women's bodies. Gilead sees women's sexuality as dangerous: women must cover themselves from head to toe, for example, and not reveal their sexual attractions.
“It’s an event, a small defiance of rule”
When Offred attracts the Guardians, she feels this ability to inspire sexual attraction is the only power she retains. Every other privilege is stripped away, down to the very act of reading, which is forbidden. Women are not even allowed to read store signs. By controlling women's minds, by not allowing them to read the authorities more easily control women's bodies. The patriarchs of Gilead want to control women's bodies, their sex lives, and their reproductive rights. The bodies of slain abortionists on the Wall hammer home the point: feminists believe that women must have abortion rights in order to control their own bodies, and in Gilead, giving women control of their bodies is a horrifying crime
Overall, The Republic of Gilead has an extremely harsh and terrifying misogynistic view of women. They see them only as fertile objects whose only use in the world is to bear children. They incorporate their views into society in the form of Handmaids whose only job is to conceive children to prevent dangerously low birth rates from occurring.