Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has all the makings of a patriarchy-smashing book. The novel, recently adapted into a TV series on Hulu, describes a religious autocracy in Massachusetts and Maine. The regime comes to power after its leaders murder the U.S. president, then rapidly strip away citizens’ rights.

In this dystopia called Gilead, women are split into five “castes”: wives, handmaids, marthas, aunts and “unwomen.” The wives are highest in rank, married to “commanders” in the Gileadean government. Handmaids are “walking wombs” who give birth to the commanders’ babies. Marthas are kitchen servants, and aunts are like prison guards: they train handmaids and snap all the women into obedience. The category of “unwomen” consists of deviant females. They’re sent to some unspecified “colonies,” where they clean toxic waste until their skin peels off.

No women are allowed to read. They’re not allowed to work, spend money, or drive. This is patriarchal rule at its most extreme.

Narrated by a miserable 33-year-old handmaid named Offred, The Handmaid’s Tale leads readers to many feminist conclusions. The book has been called a “seminal rite-of-passage novel for many young women,” as well as a “feminist sacred text.” It might surprise you to learn, then, that Margaret Atwood is only lukewarm on calling the novel feminist at all. Right before the Hulu adaptation came out in April, Atwood wrote in The New York Times:

Is The Handmaid’s Tale a “feminist” novel? If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are “feminist.”

Atwood seems to say there are several “feminisms” we can define. One kind of feminism supposedly puts women on a pedestal, ever the model of angelic perfection. Another version claims women “are so victimized they are incapable of moral choice.” And a third, which Atwoods seems most comfortable promoting, is the feminism that states women are full and flawed human beings.