- Home
- Books
- The Handmaid's Tale
- Offred’s mother

Offred’s mother
Offred’s mother was a feminist activist who campaigned for reproductive rights before Gilead.
The book

Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeOffred’s mother was a feminist activist who campaigned for reproductive rights before Gilead. Offred once found her embarrassing and only later understands more of what she was defending. At the Red Center, Offred sees footage suggesting her mother was sent to the Colonies. Her death is likely but not directly confirmed.
If you like The Handmaid's Tale
If you like Margaret Atwood
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

Paul Bowles
American novelist and composer whose expatriate fiction explores dislocation, unstable intimacy, fatalism, and North Africa.
View author
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View author
Mary Shelley
The author of Frankenstein, who first saw Paris at sixteen as a runaway. In the summer of 1814 she crossed from England to Calais with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, spent a week trapped in an expensive Paris hotel with no money, then bought a donkey and walked south-east across a France still wrecked by the Napoleonic wars. That journey became her first published book. Two years later, on a lake in Switzerland, she began her second.
View author



