What inspired the outfits in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"
In an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim, author Margaret Atwood joked about the signature red cloak and bonnet: "Well, if you have a cult, and if you have totalitarianism, you have to have outfits."
Updated on: August 16, 2026 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News
In the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, Canada, Margaret Atwood, award-winning dystopian fiction author, fished out an article from a research folder.
"Women forced to have babies," Wertheim read aloud from a news clipping.
"Communists are making women have babies," Atwood clarified. "'Persistent non-pregnancy will be considered a crime against the state,'" she quoted from an old news story about Romania.
Atwood has stacks of research for her novels in these archives. She writes by a strict rule: if it didn't happen, somewhere, at some time, it doesn't make it into the plots of her stories.
That rule applied to Atwood's most famous work, "The Handmaid's Tale," published in 1985, and later turned into an Emmy award-winning television series for Hulu.