Handmaids are women forced into a reproductive servant role, most famously in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale and its TV adaptation.

Basic meaning

In older, historical usage, a “handmaid” (or handmaiden) meant a female servant or attendant, usually to a more powerful woman. The word carries ideas of low status, service, and obedience.

Today, when people ask “what are handmaids,” they almost always mean the specific role in The Handmaid’s Tale , which has become a cultural symbol.

Handmaids in The Handmaid’s Tale

In the Republic of Gilead (the theocratic dictatorship in the story), handmaids are fertile women forced to bear children for powerful men called Commanders and their Wives.

Key points about them:

  • They are assigned to a Commander’s household with the sole purpose of becoming pregnant and giving the baby to the Commander and his Wife.
  • They must surrender any children they have; they have no legal claim to their offspring.
  • Their real names are erased; they are renamed “Of” plus their Commander’s name (for example, “Offred” = “Of Fred”).
  • They live under constant surveillance and control, with harsh punishment, exile, or death if they resist or fail to conceive.
  • The regime justifies this by claiming a fertility crisis and using religious language to frame the role as “sacred” or “honourable,” even though it is coercive.

An example: the main character Offred lives with a Commander and his Wife; once a month, they perform a ritualized sexual “Ceremony” in which the Commander tries to impregnate her while the Wife physically holds her, to mimic a biblical story about a maid bearing children for a barren wife.

Social structure around handmaids

Handmaids are one part of a rigid caste system in Gilead.

Other groups include:

  • Wives: high‑status, usually infertile, married to Commanders, who claim the children born from handmaids as their own.
  • Marthas: women who handle cooking and housework, not sexual or reproductive roles.
  • Aunts: women who train, indoctrinate, and police the handmaids; they are allowed to read and write in order to run this system.
  • “Unwomen”: those considered useless or disobedient (often infertile women, dissidents); many are sent to toxic “Colonies” as punishment.

Within this system, handmaids are paradoxical: they are both highly valued for their fertility and heavily dehumanized as mere vessels.

Symbolism and modern usage

Because of the book and TV series, “handmaid” has become a political and cultural symbol.

  • Protesters sometimes dress in the red cloak and white bonnet of the handmaids to criticize laws or proposals that restrict reproductive rights or women’s autonomy.
  • In online forums and headlines, people use phrases like “we’re not your handmaids” to reject roles that reduce women to service or reproduction.
  • The term now signals broader concerns about control over bodies, gender inequality, and the rise of authoritarian or theocratic politics.

Put simply, when someone today asks “what are handmaids,” they usually mean: fictional women in a dystopia who are forced to bear children for the ruling class—and, by extension, a powerful symbol of how real societies can control women’s bodies and choices.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.