The Handmaid’s Tale is an evergreen cautionary fable in the women’s movement, but not long after I read it in high school, I relegated it to the realm of poetic but gimmicky literary science fiction and a certain era of American politics. Set in a totalitarian, Christian fundamentalist regime called "Gilead" in which women are property, it was written in 1985 — when the Moral Majority was going strong — and I read it during the George W. Bush administration, when abstinence-only education, purity balls, and the Westboro Baptist Church were all part of the national conversation.

As the times changed, it stopped feeling relevant. But when I read it again, as the internet was debating whether gendered harassment should just be considered a basic fact of life, I decided that was exactly why it still mattered.

Everything that I originally remembered from The Handmaid’s Tale was from its somewhat shallowly drawn dystopian future. The book’s America has been locked off and strictly gender-segregated, with women divided into classes based on fertility and obedience. Environmental disasters and war have ravaged the country, and Gilead’s leaders rule through tactics lifted from history’s worst dictators. A woman named Offred (literally "of Fred," the head of her household) is a Handmaid, one of increasingly few fertile women; she’s a surrogate womb for her de facto owner’s wife, but constantly in danger of being sent to one of the remote concentration camps where the old and infertile are worked to death. Under its flowing prose, it uses intentionally derivative ideas, and it was written a decade after the wildly original feminist science fiction of writers like James Tiptree, Jr. and Joanna Russ. Novels like A Walk to the End of the World and Swastika Night had already addressed similar premises, with less literary flair but more interesting speculation.

"I thought, already he’s starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you’re starting to get paranoid."

Beyond this, the book is unmistakably a product of its time in a way I hadn’t originally realized, full of references to lesbian separatist collectives, AIDS, and the porn-focused "sex wars" that saw radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin strike an unlikely alliance with Reagan-era religious conservatives. There’s a cruel and fairly direct swipe at Christian anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and televangelist Tammy Faye-Bakker, though Dworkin’s compatriots don’t come off much better. And it’s quite specific about how Gilead’s leaders come to power — a fringe religious group massacres top politicians and freezes women’s bank accounts — which makes it easy to dispute its realism. But as improbable as Gilead’s sudden formation is, the apathetic public response to it feels like a grotesquely accurate caricature of real life. Unlike 1984’s Winston Smith, Offred remembers the old world well. And the book’s real horror is not the fantastic future as much as the past.

Atwood covered ironic misogyny and the notion that sexism is over long before somebody thought to put "feminist" on the Time banned words list. When Offred muses about what she’s lost, she can’t do it without stumbling over one of the little indignities that many women are still expected to ignore, to pretend are just unimportant quirks in an otherwise equitable world: avoiding being out alone at night, having your husband’s job treated as a birthright and your own as an afterthought, expecting to be treated as a target anywhere you go. Offred spends the book looking for her lost husband, something that I found romantic on my first read. On my second, it was far more frustrating. Luke, in her memories, is well-meaning and kind. But there’s a constant tension, as he dismisses her fears about what will turn out to be a genocidal theocracy because the only people affected — until it’s too late — are women. "It’s only a job," he tells her, after she’s been summarily fired under martial law:

Hush, he said. … You know I’ll always take care of you. I thought, already he’s starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you’re starting to get paranoid.