American New Right

• Atwood’s clippings research file for The Handmaid’s Tale contains lots of material about the American New Right in the early 1980s
• In 1979 the Baptist minister and televangelist Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a movement that brought together and mobilised the support of many Christians and Republicans
• Televangelists like Falwell, Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker were extremely popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s
• Tammy Faye Bakker has been cited as a possible model for the Commander’s wife
• Religious right-wing fundamentalist groups became a serious political force in America
• They gave strong backing to President Reagan and the Republican Party
• In 1983 a collection of essays called “The New Right at Harvard” was published. This might at least partly explain why Atwood chose Harvard University as the ‘heartland’ of Gilead.
• The New Right warned about the ‘birth dearth’ and expressed concern about such matters as the right to abortion, the rise in divorce and the growing Gay Rights movement.
• They looked back to America’s Puritan inheritance, and was politically powerful throughout the 1980s under Reagan and George Bush Snr.
• Support for the New Right was particularly strong in the ‘Bible Belt’: south-eastern and south-central America where Church attendance is high and evangelical Christianity is popular.
• Several prominent women activists were associated with this movement. Phyllis Schlafly travelled round the country making speeches and mobilising women to support right-wing policies on gender and family issues. 
• Phyllis Schlafly is also sometimes cited as a possible model for the Commander’s wife
• Writing from Berlin, Atwood had distance and reflection on America at the time
• The American New Right was also responsible for some firebombings on Abortion Clinics
• Reagan’s rhetoric appealed to the Bible belt of America and warned against the perceived sins of homosexuality, abortion and divorce.
•  Reagan - quote on bible

  "within the covers of the Bible are all the answers for all the problems men face".
• The New Right used 'birth dearth' as an opportunity to

  • promote traditional heterosexual family values
  • promote the role of women as ‘procreators’
  • in order to save society from the ills of homosexuality, falling birth rates and AIDS.