Texas Politics In 2025: The Gilead Wives Club's Next Moves

Inside the patriarchal playbook for Texas’ 89th Session.

https://www.lonestarleft.com/p/texas-politics-in-2025-the-gilead



If you’re unfamiliar, the women at the top of the picture are the wives of Gilead from the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the novel of the same title by Margaret Atwood. If you haven’t read the book or watched the series, the wives in Gilead held the Handmaids down while their husbands raped them.

The similarities between the fictional wives of Gilead and the Republican women in the so-called “Gilead Wives Club” lie in their roles as enforcers of a patriarchal agenda. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the wives actively uphold a system that oppresses women, even though they, too, are constrained by its rules. Likewise, the Republican women in the Texas Legislature have played a pivotal role in advancing legislation that strips women of their rights and bodily autonomy.

By being the arbiters of the abortion policy, they actively enforce a system that denies women their autonomy. Much like the wives of Gilead, they use their positions of relative privilege and power not to challenge systemic injustice but to reinforce it, ensuring that the dystopian ideals they support are inflicted on others.

And that’s how some of the Republican women in the Texas House became known as the “Gilead Wives Club.”