Women cannot hold property

Women cannot hold property is a foundational legal principle of the Republic of Gilead, enacted to strip women of economic independence and enforce their total dependence on male relatives or Commanders. The law was implemented suddenly and simultaneously with the mass firing of women from their jobs, freezing their bank accounts, and transferring all assets to male next of kin. This legal dispossession is a central mechanism of Gilead's patriarchal control, reducing women to a state of legal and economic non-personhood and making them entirely reliant on the state and its male heads of household for survival.

Legal Enactment and Economic Dispossession

The law was enacted as part of a coordinated, nationwide crackdown. Offred recalls the day her Compunumber was suddenly invalidated at a corner store, and she was unable to access her bank account, which held over two thousand dollars. Her friend Moira explained the new reality: "Women can't hold property anymore. It's a new law." All accounts with an "F" on them instead of an "M" were frozen. The law was accompanied by the immediate termination of women's employment; Offred and her colleagues were fired from their library jobs, told by their director that it was "the law" and that they had to leave. Moira's own job at a women's collective publishing house was also eliminated. The simultaneous freezing of Compucounts and the firing of women from their jobs was a deliberate strategy to prevent women from fleeing the country, as Moira noted: "They had to do it that way, the Compucounts and the jobs both at once. Can you picture the airports, otherwise? They don't want us going anywhere."

Transfer of Assets and Legal Dependency

Under the new law, a woman's assets were transferred to her husband or male next of kin. Moira explained to Offred that Luke could use her Compucount for her, as the system would transfer her number to him. This legal mechanism created a state of complete economic dependency. Offred, who had once earned her own money and bought her own clothes, now had no control over any financial resources. The law effectively made women legal minors, unable to own property, hold a job, or access their own money without male authorization. This economic disenfranchisement was a deliberate tool to enforce women's submission and ensure their compliance with Gilead's social order.

Consequences for Handmaids and Other Women

For Handmaids like Offred, the inability to hold property was compounded by their complete lack of personal possessions. They were issued standardized red dresses, white wings, and red shoes, and had no private property of any kind. Offred's longing for small items—a knife, a cigarette, a magazine, hand lotion—underscores her total material deprivation. The law also meant that women could not engage in any economic activity; there were no lawyers anymore, and the university was closed. The only currency that remained was the black market, where items like cigarettes and whiskey could be traded, but even this was a precarious and dangerous realm. The law's reach extended to the most intimate aspects of life: Offred's daughter was taken from her and adopted by a childless couple, and Offred herself was reduced to a "two-legged womb," a "national resource" whose value lay solely in her reproductive capacity. The tattoo on her ankle, a passport in reverse, symbolized her transformation from a person with legal standing into a piece of state property.

The Law's Ideological Foundation

The law was justified through a combination of religious doctrine and pseudo-scientific reasoning. Aunt Lydia taught that women should cultivate "poverty of spirit" and not be attached to the "material world." The regime's ideology framed women's economic independence as a source of social decay, and their return to the home as a restoration of traditional values. The Commander himself argued that the pre-Gilead system had left men with "nothing to do with women" and that the new order provided women with "protection" and the ability to "fulfill their biological destinies in peace." The law was thus presented not as a deprivation but as a liberation from the burdens of economic responsibility and choice. This ideological framing, however, could not mask the brutal reality of women's complete legal and economic subjugation, a reality that Offred and others experienced every day in their enforced poverty and dependence.