Offred's Mother

Offred's Mother is a figure conjured entirely from memory, yet she exerts a gravitational pull on Offred's inner life. A feminist activist of the pre-Gilead era, she raised Offred as a single mother, worked as a librarian, and spent decades marching, burning pornography, and arguing for a woman's right to choose. In the Republic of Gilead, where women's bodies are nationalized and their pasts erased, Offred's Mother becomes a ghost—one whose political commitments and personal sacrifices Offred once resisted but now, in retrospect, cannot stop measuring herself against.

Identity and Background

Offred's Mother was a woman of fierce independence and public conviction. She worked at a library, transferring books to computer discs, and was part of a generation of women who marched in the abortion riots and the porn riots of the 1970s and 1980s. Offred recalls her mother returning home with a bruise on her face and a little blood after one such march, saying, "You can't stick your hand through a glass window without getting cut." She was a regular at protests carrying signs that read "TAKE BACK THE NIGHT" and "FREEDOM TO CHOOSE." She had Offred at age thirty-seven, a decision she defended fiercely against friends who accused her of being "pronatalist" and against doctors who labeled her an "Aged Primipara." She refused to dye her gray hair, saying, "Why pretend?" and dismissed men as useful only "for ten seconds' worth of half babies." Her apartment was full of books, her kitchen table was where she held forth with a drink in hand, and her friendships were with other women who shared her politics.

Life and Plot Trajectory

Offred's Mother does not appear in the novel's present tense. She exists only in Offred's memories, dreams, and one devastating piece of secondhand news. Offred remembers feeding ducks with her as a child, only to discover her mother had brought her to a book-burning protest where women were throwing magazines—including one showing a naked woman hanging from a chain—into a fire. Later, during Offred's college years, her mother would visit and argue with Luke about feminism, calling him a "chauvinist pig" while he teased her back. After the Gileadean takeover, Offred tried to reach her by phone but got no answer. When she and Luke forced open her mother's apartment, they found it ransacked—furniture overturned, mattress ripped open—and her mother gone. The last trace of her comes from Moira, who, while imprisoned at Jezebels, tells Offred she saw her mother in a propaganda film about the Colonies: a close-up of a woman wrapped in a gray dress, sweeping toxic waste. Offred clings to the hope that her mother's "cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz" might somehow save her, but she knows it is not true.

Key Actions and Objectives

Offred's Mother's defining action is her lifelong activism. She marched, she organized, she burned pornography in public, she raised a child alone while working, and she refused to apologize for any of it. Her objective was not personal comfort but structural change: she wanted a world where women could choose their lives, control their bodies, and be free from male violence. She told Offred, "You young people don't appreciate things. You don't know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are." She also wanted Offred to vindicate her choices—a burden Offred resented. "I am not your justification for existence," Offred once told her. Yet in Gilead, Offred finds herself repeating her mother's phrases and longing for her presence.

Relationships and Conflict

The relationship between Offred and her mother was never easy. Offred found her embarrassing as a teenager—her overalls, her swearing, her rowdy friends—and later resented the expectation that she would live out her mother's ideals. "I didn't want to live my life on her terms," Offred reflects. They fought about Luke, about feminism, about the meaning of choice. Offred's Mother dismissed Offred's life as "a backlash" and predicted that "history will absolve me." Yet beneath the conflict was a deep, unspoken bond. Offred remembers her mother's loneliness—"I was so lonely," she would say, crying—and admits, "I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy." After her disappearance, Offred wishes she could tell her, "I finally know this."

Change and Ending

Offred's Mother's ending is ambiguous and grim. Her apartment was ransacked, suggesting arrest. Moira's sighting of her in a Colony propaganda film implies she was sent to the toxic cleanup squads, where the life expectancy is three years. Offred mourns her already but knows she will have to do it again and again. The last image Offred has of her is from a film shown at the Red Center: her mother, young and earnest, marching with a banner, raising her fist, surrounded by balloons. That image—of hope, of solidarity, of a fight that was lost—becomes a kind of prayer for Offred, who now lives in the world her mother fought against.

Narrative Role and Evaluation

Offred's Mother functions as the novel's most potent symbol of the pre-Gilead feminist movement—its victories, its excesses, and its ultimate failure to prevent the regime that followed. She is also Offred's most intimate link to a self that predates Gilead. In a world where Offred's own name is forbidden and her daughter has been taken, her mother's memory is one of the few possessions she has left. Yet the relationship is not sentimentalized: Offred's Mother was difficult, demanding, and sometimes wrong. Her story underscores the novel's central irony: the "women's culture" the feminists fought for has arrived, but it is a nightmare, not a utopia. Offred's Mother wanted a world where women could choose; Gilead gives them no choice at all. Her absence is the measure of everything that has been lost.