After six haunting seasons, The Handmaid’s Tale has aired its final episode. Yet, the chilling legacy of Gilead is far from fiction. While audiences may have approached the show as dystopian drama, creator Margaret Atwood has long made it clear: every law, punishment, and ritual in the series has roots in real history. Read more inside.
According to a viral post shared by Culture Cut Women, the creator famously said she only used real-world examples to build Gilead. In fact, Atwood stated that she did not invent a single atrocity. Gilead, the authoritarian theocracy depicted in the series, is constructed entirely from real-world examples pulled from religion, war crimes, and global gender oppression. What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so terrifying isn’t the red robes or forced surrogacy—it’s that for many women, this wasn’t dystopia, but recognition.
Atwood drew on historical regimes, including Nazi Germany’s Lebensborn breeding program, where “racially pure” women were forced to give birth to children for the Reich. In Gilead, Handmaids are stripped of their names, identities, and bodily autonomy in eerily similar fashion. Biblical surrogacy—the story of Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah—served as the scriptural justification for these modern horrors. Public executions, used to maintain fear and order in Gilead, have long been a method of control in authoritarian states.
Modern parallels also echo the show’s themes. From restrictive reproductive laws to widespread gender-based violence, elements of Gilead remain alive in many parts of the world today. In the United States and abroad, the rollback of reproductive rights has felt like a step closer to Atwood’s world for many viewers (especially those for whom bodily autonomy has never been fully guaranteed).
As the show concludes, fans reflect not only on the fates of characters like June and Serena, but also on what The Handmaid’s Tale represents: a warning. The finale may mark the end of this chapter, but its cultural relevance persists. It reminds us that the systems of oppression depicted on screen have existed before—and in some places, still do.
For some, The Handmaid’s Tale was never just a show. It was a mirror. And now that the final curtain has dropped, it’s up to us to ensure fiction doesn’t continue repeating itself as fact.