Small spoilers, so don't continue unless you've read the book or don't mind them!

This is really just a small thing. I noticed Moira's costume in the hotel-bordello was a Playboy Bunny costume. (The narrator could not place it.)

Feminist Gloria Steinem famously went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in the early 1960s to do an exposé.

The original exposé.

Fifty years later.

It's very explicit that Moira represents the tough, edgy, lesbian, gum-smacking, no-shit-taking, feminist woman.

This made me think about about archetypes. I think all the women represent something, and that the 3 Re-eductation Center women who we know best — the Handmaid, Moira, and Janine — represent three general ways regular (and fertile) women might go in this dystopia. They are the warning; they are "One of these is what would happen to you." We all imagine we'd be leading insurgencies or that we'd never play along, but unless we're in a very powerful position to begin with, we'd in reality just wind up buffeted by the winds of change and trying our best to get by. These three might even also sort of represent maiden, mother, crone, though of course I'm stretching here.

Janine: Maiden. She's been pregnant before, and had an abortion. It was the product of a rape when she was a teenager. I think the Handmaid even says she and the other women in the Center doubt her tale, a nod to rape culture. Janine is naïve, a people pleaser, wants to gain approval and get by. She simpers to authority figures. She's broken down at the Center by being blamed for causing her rape. She doesn't quite cut it in Gilead, able to get pregnant twice but the babies not viable, and at the end she's gone completely unhinged. She is lost.

Handmaid (Offred): Mother. Not that she acts motherly, I think, but that it's an important facet to her identity. She thinks of her child often, and the thought of protecting her child if she is alive that keeps her from doing rash things.

Moira: Crone. Witch. Feminist. She's a rebel. She's probably what most readers imagine they'd be in this situation, so she's someone to look up to, because the narrator certainly fails at that (which I think is great and could be its own topic). The last we see of Moira, she's a prostitute in a Playboy Bunny costume who is resigned to her fate, certain she'll die/be killed in 3 or 4 years when her body wears out. She's still smart-talking, but she tried to escape, and got recaptured and punished for it so traumatically that this woman who loves to gab refuses to describe one word of it. She, too, is broken by Gilead.