Take Back the Night
Take Back the Night is a feminist protest slogan that surfaces within the regime's propaganda apparatus at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, where it is deployed as a cautionary relic of the pre-Gilead era. During one of the weekly documentary screenings that Aunt Lydia uses to illustrate the supposed depravity of the former time, Offred watches a film in which her own mother—younger than Offred has ever seen her—appears as a participant in a women's liberation march. The camera pans across a bedsheet banner bearing the words "TAKE BACK THE NIGHT," a phrase that has not been blacked out despite the regime's usual practice of censoring all writing visible in such films. The slogan thus reaches Offred and the other Handmaids not as a piece of forbidden knowledge but as an officially sanctioned image of the past, intended to remind them of the era of "no safety" that Gilead claims to have superseded.
The Slogan's Context and Visual Surroundings
The banner is part of a larger protest scene that the camera captures only briefly. Behind "TAKE BACK THE NIGHT" Offred glimpses other signs reading "FREEDOM TO CHOOSE," "EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY," "RECAPTURE OUR BODIES," and "DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMAN'S PLACE IS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE?"—the last accompanied by a line drawing of a woman's body lying on a table with blood dripping from it. The film shows Offred's mother, dressed in overall jeans and a plaid shirt with a kerchief tied behind her head, moving forward with the crowd, smiling and laughing, raising her fists in the air as hundreds of red balloons rise into the sky. The balloons bear a circle with a stem like the stem of an apple or a cross. The camera then shifts to the sky, and Offred loses sight of her mother in the crowd.
Narrative and Thematic Significance
The appearance of "TAKE BACK THE NIGHT" in the documentary creates a complex temporal and emotional layering. Offred, watching from her mat in the darkened Domestic Science room, recognizes her mother in a moment of political conviction that predates her own birth—a version of her mother she has never known directly. The slogan, which originally demanded women's freedom from male violence in public spaces, is here repurposed by Aunt Lydia as evidence of the chaos and immorality of the pre-Gilead world. Yet the film's inclusion of the unblacked-out writing also functions as a kind of accidental transmission: the Handmaids breathe in and stir when they see the words, aware that they are reading something the regime has not fully erased. Offred later recalls her mother's fierce independence—her refusal to dye her gray hair, her dismissive remarks about men, her insistence that she had Offred as a wanted child at age thirty-seven despite pressure from friends—and the memory of the march becomes a thread connecting Offred to a lost world of female solidarity and political action. The slogan thus operates as both a relic of a defeated movement and a ghostly reminder that another way of organizing society once existed, and that women fought for it in the streets.
