The Handmaid’s Tale at first glance seems to be a sort of dystopian novel, depicting a world in which women are oppressed and given virtually no rights. While reading it, the treatment of women seems shocking, and almost unbelievable to me, a Canadian citizen who has the same rights as any man. However, once I started to think about it, the world does indeed have places where this oppression of women is almost as obvious as in The Handmaid’s Tale. A quick internet search for oppressed women brings up countless pages of news stories from the Middle East, especially in countries such as Saudi Arabia. The oppression of women in these countries relies often on the same weapon used in The Handmaid’s Tale – the restriction of access to knowledge. Many women in these countries believe the laws to be fair, once they understand them; the issue arises, they say, from the fact that what rights women do have and how the law works is rarely understood by women. This sort of knowledge in women is rare in these countries, and results in their being abused because of it. For example, like in The Handmaid’s Tale, in Saudi Arabia, fathers have guardianship over their daughters, and because of this can restrict their activities; this can lead to the actual transfer of guardianship (or ownership, some might call it) to another relative – male of course. The fact that many of these countries are theocracies ruled by Shariah law makes it even easier to see the disturbingly clear similarities between some of the countries in the Middle East today and Atwood’s Republic of Gilead.