Quakers
The Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, are one of the religious groups most actively persecuted by the regime of the Republic of Gilead. Their pacifist beliefs, commitment to equality, and history of social activism make them natural opponents of the theocratic state, and they pay a heavy price for their resistance. In the world of the novel, the Quakers are not merely dissenters in belief but active participants in the underground resistance, risking their lives to shelter and transport fugitives. Their presence in the narrative, though glimpsed only through secondhand accounts and news reports, provides one of the few concrete signs that organized opposition to Gilead exists and operates with a moral clarity that the regime cannot extinguish.
Persecution and Arrest
The Quakers are first mentioned in the context of a news broadcast that Offred watches during the Ceremony evening. The anchorman, with his kindly, fatherly manner, announces that "five members of the heretical sect of Quakers have been arrested" for smuggling "precious national resources over the border into Canada." The television then shows two of the arrested Quakers, a man and a woman about fifty years old, who "look terrified, but they're trying to preserve some dignity in front of the camera." The man has a large dark mark on his forehead; the woman's veil has been torn off, and her hair falls in strands over her face. This image, broadcast as a warning, reveals the brutality of the regime's treatment of religious dissidents and the public shaming to which they are subjected. The charge of smuggling national resources is a political accusation that masks the real crime: helping people escape.
Role in the Underground Femaleroad
Moira, after her escape from the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, finds refuge with a Quaker couple who are part of the Underground Femaleroad. She describes them as "pay dirt" because their home is "a station on the Underground Femaleroad." The Quakers she encounters are married couples with children, which makes them safer than single people or anyone gay, as the regime is less suspicious of families. They take enormous risks: they burn Moira's Aunt's outfit and pass in their furnace, they hide her in their home, and they pass her along a chain of safe houses, each station in contact with only the next one along to minimize the damage if one is caught. Moira notes that they act out of religious conviction, telling her "they were doing it for religious reasons and I shouldn't take it personally." They hold silent prayers every evening, a practice that initially sickens Moira because it reminds her of the forced piety at the Red Center, but she comes to understand that "it was what kept them going." The Quakers' faith, far from being a tool of oppression as it is in Gilead, becomes the foundation of their courageous resistance.
The Cost of Resistance
The Quakers pay for their defiance with their lives. Moira learns, after her own recapture, that the driver who helped her cross into the city proper in a mail sack "ended up on the Wall." The network is infiltrated and broken; Moira herself is caught just as she is about to escape by boat from Maine. The Quaker couple who sheltered her in that final attempt, an older couple in their fifties, are arrested alongside her, and she never learns what became of them. The regime's televised trials and executions of Quakers serve as a deterrent, but the fact that the network continues to operate, even after such losses, testifies to the depth of their commitment. The Quakers embody a form of faith-based resistance that stands in stark contrast to the state religion of Gilead: where the regime uses the Bible to justify control and cruelty, the Quakers use their beliefs to justify sacrifice and mercy.
