What inspired the outfits in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"

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.

Atwood told Wertheim there were several ways into the story, but an inciting event came in 1981, just after former President Ronald Reagan was elected for the office.

"And this was the moment at which the religious right was getting organized as a political force," she told Wertheim.

"This friend said to me, 'Have you heard what they're saying?'... and one of the visions was that women should be back in the home."

This moment, Atwood explained, also coincided with an increased participation of women in the workforce.

"My question to myself was: now that they're all running around having credit cards and jobs, how are you going to get them back into the home?"

Atwood cited George Orwell as an influence too, saying, "I had read '1984' as a very young teenager and been extremely impressed by it."

Wertheim asked about the now-iconic red cloaks and bonnets that have become a uniform of political resistance in the Trump era.

"Well, if you have a cult, and if you [have] totalitarianism, you have to have outfits," Atwood told 60 Minutes.

The bonnet-and-cloak outfit was largely inspired by a can of Old Dutch cleaning solution.