The Henmaid’s Tale

The “henmaid” in the title of my book The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale inspired this intriguing artwork by animal rights activist & artist Mary Britton Clouse, codirector of Chicken Run Rescue. My “henmaid” is an allusion to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are valued only for their ovaries and exist at the mercy of their keepers, their rapists – ordinary men controlling society with the help of female collaborators. The “henmaid” symbolizes the billions of birds who at this moment, and every moment, are imprisoned in the hell of the poultry and egg industry.

She also symbolizes a sister soul who is scorned by some feminists who resent the comparison of women with the females of other species and consider such comparisons demeaning to women. Such feminists collaborate with the “ordinary men controlling society” by enacting the same sort of bigoted attitudes and behaviors they otherwise reject. This includes eating the flesh and eggs of their female counterparts and resenting “interference” with their “right” to collaborate in privileged violence against their sisters of other species. Furthermore, as Carol J. Adams has pointed out in The Sexual Politics of Meat, farmed animals of both sexes are “feminized” by their human captors for whom their bodies are nothing but containers of “food” products and more babies to mistreat. – Karen Davis