Offred's Mother

Offred's mother ends up in the Colonies as an Unwoman, performing brutal forced labor. Offred discovers this when she recognizes her mother in a documentary film screened at the Red Center — aged and visibly worn. The moment is devastating in its irony: a woman who spent her life fighting for women's freedoms now survives as a living punishment within the very system that destroyed those freedoms.

Their relationship is defined by love complicated by ideological distance. As a child, Offred was embarrassed by her mother's radical feminism — the protests, the marches, the blunt politics — and as a young woman she quietly rejected that worldview in favor of a conventional life with Luke. Under Gilead, Offred comes to recognize her mother's prescience, and grief and survivor's guilt color every memory she has of her.

Yes — she was a passionate, unapologetic second-wave feminist. She attended Take Back the Night marches, publicly burned pornographic magazines, and deliberately chose single motherhood, viewing men as largely unnecessary for a fulfilling life. Atwood presents her as a woman who lived her convictions at considerable personal cost long before Gilead made that cost catastrophic.

She distrusted Luke because he had already left one partner to be with Offred — a pattern she found predictable and troubling. Her skepticism reflected her broader critique of romantic dependency on men as a political vulnerability for women. Offred found this wariness intrusive at the time, but Gilead ultimately proves her mother's point: once Luke is gone, Offred's options vanish entirely.

The wave is the last communication between mother and daughter, and Atwood deliberately leaves it ambiguous — it could be defiance, acknowledgment, a performance for her captors, or some impossible combination of all three. That the gesture is mediated by Gilead's surveillance apparatus, and screened as propaganda by the Aunts, makes it both deeply personal and cruelly co-opted, encapsulating the novel's argument about how authoritarian systems weaponize the suffering of resisters.

Moira was a close friend of Offred's mother and is identified by Offred as her mother's spiritual heir — bold, uncompromising, and politically engaged. The two women share kindred temperaments rooted in unapologetic feminist conviction. This link connects the two most rebellious figures in Offred's life and underscores a generational continuity of resistance that Gilead systematically sets out to destroy.

Atwood withholds her name to mirror Gilead's systematic erasure of women's identities — a practice applied to Offred herself, who is also nameless in the primary narrative. The absence of a name strips both women of individual selfhood in the text, reinforcing how completely Gilead obliterates female identity, and it is especially pointed that a woman who fought so fiercely for autonomy cannot even be recovered by name in her own daughter's account.

She functions primarily as a symbol of second-wave feminist history and its violent suppression under Gilead. Her fate — a lifelong activist reduced to Unwoman status in the Colonies — concentrates Atwood's argument that totalitarian systems specifically target those who fought hardest for the freedoms they destroy. She also represents the generational tension between activism and conformity, implicitly measuring Offred's own passivity and stirring her guilt throughout the novel.