Set in future, Gilead is totalitarian nightmare. Thanks to a Second American Civil War, women are now just baby-making machines. Fertility rates? Plummeted. Offred, our star, is a Handmaid for a fancy family. She dodges oppression and hunts for freedom. Because who doesn’t want to escape a world where your value is measured in eggs?

Meet the women from The Handmaid’s Tale

Wives

Wives are the glossy, buttoned-up top tier — crisp gloves, perfect hair, and a smile that could freeze a room. They manage households like small, brittle empires and are equal parts bored socialite and calculating survivor, which is weird because sometimes they seem genuinely maternal? Anyway, they love etiquette books and tea rituals but will also throw a plate (not that they admit it) — there’s a sharpness under all that starch. They’re the public face of order but privately often unravel in tiny, dramatic ways, whispering secrets into the cushions.

Aunts

Aunts are the weirdly cheerful architects of control — drill-sergeant nuns meets camp counselor, except the camp is terrifying and their “counsel” is doctrine. They preach, they pat, they break people down with smiles and knitted sweaters, and yes, I have this image of one humming lullabies while writing notes in a ledger — creepy, right? They can be almost maternal one second and then clinical the next, which makes them unpredictable and honestly kind of chilling. Also they hoard little comforts (like stale candy or pens) like tiny trophies, which feels human and monstrous at once.

Marthas

Marthas are the quiet backbone — practical, efficient, always with flour on their hands and lists in their heads, like domestic ninjas who also happen to be reservoirs of gossip. They keep the household machinery humming, mend things (and people?) in ways that are mostly unseen, and have this dry, gallows-humor that slips out over coffee. Often underestimated, they remember family histories down to the last casserole recipe, and somehow that memory is power. They’ll scold you about dust but also keep your secrets in a sock drawer; I swear some of them have a secret fondness for tiny china figurines.

Handmaids

Handmaids are the heart — red cloaks, bowed heads, but inside there’s this constant, low-burning rebellion, memories tucked like contraband. They are defined by loss and enforced purpose, yet many of them carry astonishing resilience, little acts of defiance like hiding notes or humming forbidden tunes, and sometimes a smirk you only catch for a second. It’s complicated because they can be both resigned and quietly ferocious, performing obedience on the surface while keeping a whole private world in their minds. Also random little things — some of them memorize recipes or press flowers in books — tiny delicate rebellions that feel like lifelines.

Econowives

Econowives are like the patchwork of society — part-wife, part-worker, part-everyday survival expert, wearing a mishmash of colors and roles that somehow, maddeningly, fits. They juggle work and home with a weary practicality and a kind of blunt humor, not fancy but fiercely pragmatic, which makes them both resilient and quietly resentful of the nicer tiers. They seem to resent being pawned between categories but also cling to whatever stability they can get, which is both stubborn and kind of heartbreaking. Little quirk — some hoard buttons and fabric scraps like talismans, which is oddly sweet and totally makes sense.

Unwomen

Unwomen are exiled, raw — marked as disposable by society but actually some of the hardest, weirdly free people you’ll encounter, if freedom can be scored by survival. They live on the fringes, working menial, dangerous jobs, and there’s this strange camaraderie born of shared exile; they’re both hardened and fiercely loyal to each other. People call them failures but they carry knowledge and stories that no one expects — like survivors who have turned scarcity into a bitter kind of wisdom. Also, and this is random, I always picture a few of them with a ridiculous collection of rusty spoons or song fragments — little human oddities that make them feel real.