The Bookworm says… YES! Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time follows Connie, a Mexican-American woman living on the streets of New York who lost her pickpocket husband to a hepatitis clinical trial when he was in prison and her daughter to the state after breaking her arm in a drug and alcohol fueled rage. After bashing in her niece’s pimp’s face with a wine bottle she is institutionalized in a state mental hospital. While in the hospital she is visited by Luciente, an inhabitant of Mattapoisett Village in the year 2137. Luciente and her community show Connie a potential future reality; a society of shared labor, gender equality, and environmental preservation. After becoming part of an experimental brain surgery trial, Connie also glimpses an alternative future, one where women exist as sex objects, waste is abundant, resources are scarce, and people are mere commodities. She realizes that only one of these futures can possibly exist, and that the burden of responsibility for the outcome may lie in her decisions. In Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy repurposes traditional tropes of science fiction and radically imagines a future utopia in which technological and scientific developments facilitate the elimination of gender as a distinction in order to highlight gender based discrimination and advocate for social change.
Time travel is an essential aspect of the narrative in Woman on the Edge of Time, as well as most science fiction novels of the twentieth century. In popular science fiction, traditionally men were the only characters who had supernatural powers; when women had these powers, they were passive and out of their control (Russ 83). However, in Woman on the Edge of Time, only women possess the power of time travel. When attempting to reach Luciente one night, Connie “called for [her]… Nothing happened. She tried again. She pushed blindly…”(Piercy 222). Not only are Connie and Luciente the only characters seen traveling through time throughout the novel, it is also clear from the diction in this narration that it requires a concerted effort. By bestowing this active power exclusively unto women, Piercy inverts another trope of popular twentieth century science fiction. In mainstream novels of the time, masculinity was associated with power while femininity was associated with powerlessness (Russ 84). In Woman on the Edge of Time, this gendered power dynamic is only seen in the contemporary depiction of society. The men with whom Connie interacts in her reality are powerful, and they use their power to ensure her continued oppression. The novel begins with Geraldo, Connie’s niece’s pimp, lying about her violent outburst to ensure her institutionalization (Piercy 14). While a patient at the hospital, a team of male doctors dictate Connie’s “treatment” and subject her to painful and degrading procedures and trials (Piercy 234). Throughout her stay, in spite of her attempts to escape, her brother Luis acts as her medical proxy and forces her continued stay at the hospital and participation in treatment (234). When she finally does escape from the hospital, the man working at the ticket counter at the bus station turns her in, resulting in her return to custody (Piercy 280). At every turn, Connie is rendered powerless while a man is powerful, yet only in her present reality, never the future. Connie’s continued and inescapable oppression at the hands of men imitates the oppression of women by gender inequality more broadly. By juxtaposing such extensive and abhorrent oppression by powerful men in Connie’s life with a future utopia lacking any gender based power imbalance, Piercy calls attention to the need for change and goes on to present a techno-futuristic model for achieving it.
This model is illustrated in Mattapoisett and is characterized by innovative technologies which eliminate the exclusive role of women in reproduction. In Mattapoisett, there is a building called “the brooder” where “all in a sluggish row, babies bobbed. Mother the machine. Like fish in the aquarium at Coney Island”(Piercy 107). The futuristic technology Piercy imagines eliminates the intimate and emotional aspects of pregnancy, comparing fertilization and development to the scientific process of raising fish in an aquarium. By removing the human womb from fetal development, this model also eliminates gender from reproduction and motherhood in favor of the gender neutral machine; the maternal language used in reference to the machine highlights the importance of technology in a future of complete gender equality. Connie expresses extreme disgust after seeing the developing embryos, struggling to understand the use of ectogenesis; Luciente explains that in the fight for gender equality “there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. As long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal”(Piercy 110). This echoes the work of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, published just years before Woman on the Edge of Time, in which she advocates for replacing female reproduction with artificial reproduction in order to eliminate the domestic division of labor and bring an end to “the tyranny of the biological family”(Firestone). Aligning herself with radical feminists of the time, Piercy advocates for artificial reproduction as a means of achieving gender equality. The incorporation of these radical ideals helps readers, especially skeptics, envision a future in which these ideals create a utopian reality. Once readers visualize the future that is possible, they are empowered to advocate for the change needed to achieve that reality.
Building on Mattapoisett’s elimination of the division of labor in reproduction is the complete elimination of gender differentiation in all other aspects of life. Eliminating the burden of reproduction from women is followed by the elimination of the burden of motherhood. Luciente explains to Connie that when only women were mothers, men failed to develop important qualities of tenderness and children relied too heavily on women, so “every child has three [mothers]. To break the nuclear bonding”(Piercy 110). Continuing the depersonalization of motherhood introduced with the concept of ectogenesis, the nature of having three mothers, male and female, strips motherhood of its inherent femininity. The tri-parent family structure inverts a trademark of mainstream twentieth century science-fiction writing, the preservation of traditional family dynamics in imaginative futures. Joanna Russ describes this phenomenon as “intergalactic suburbia”, in which the relationships between the sexes in most literary science fiction are those of “present-day, white, middle class suburbia”(Russ 81). By inverting this trope of popular science fiction and de-feminizing motherhood in her future utopia, Piercy suggests that eliminating the structure of the nuclear family is essential to achieving gender equality. Further, Piercy’s imagined tri-parent structure explicitly prevents the gender based division of labor in the parent-child relationship by redistributing traditionally gendered responsibilities, such as breastfeeding. In Mattapoisett, “at least two of the three mothers agree to breast-feed. The way we do it, no one has enough alone, but two or three together share breast-feeding”(Piercy 143). Breastfeeding ties the infant to the mother and demands labor of the mother throughout infancy; imagining future hormone technology which allows men to share the burden of this labor further de-feminizes motherhood and prevents the three parent family structure from mimicking traditional gender dynamics of the nuclear family. The technologies imagined in Marge Piercy’s future utopia allow her to invert common tropes of popular science fiction in order to suggest that eliminating the nuclear family structure is essential to eliminating gender inequality.
In Mattapoisett, removing gender from reproduction, family, and finally sexuality facilitates the imagination of a society in which gender lacks cultural relevance. When Connie questions a sexual relationship between two male residents, another resident named Parra explains, “all coupling, all befriending goes on between biological males, biological females, or both. That’s not a useful set of categories. We tend to divvy up people by what they’re good at and bad at, strengths and weaknesses, gifts and failings”(Piercy 232). Since reproduction is not tied to sexual intercourse in this future utopia, there is no biological need demanding gendered sexual pairings; having sexual relationships between people of all genders allows the residents of Mattapoisett to move beyond using gender as a defining characteristic, as Connie learns from Parra. The alternative descriptive categories Parra offers suggest a society lacking gender distinction, supporting Shulamith Firestone’s radical argument that true gender equality means gender losing all cultural value as a differentiating factor (Firestone). Piercy’s support of Firestone’s emphasis on the elimination of cultural distinction is the lack of gendered pronouns used in her future utopia. Instead of using the traditional binary pronouns of she/her and he/him, in Mattapoisett people use the gender neutral “person” (personal) and “per” (possessive) (Piercy). Considering language as a form of technology, this system of neutral pronouns is one of the technologies Piercy imagines which is most essential to her future utopia. After breaking down the cultural value of gender in various sexual and familial structures, she offers this technology as a way to preserve and maintain genderless systems. This innovation and her alignment with radical feminist ideals prove that Piercy imagines the utopia of Mattapoisett as a model for her readers to strive for in their pursuit of feminist advocacy and social change.
I recommend Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time wholeheartedly. Her innovative depiction of a utopian society highly influenced by 1970s radical feminist thought provides a framework for her readers of ideals to strive for and models to accomplish them. She highlights the elimination of gender as a differentiating factor of cultural significance as the most important goal of the feminist revolution; while this is a radical goal, she provides strategies which make the radical concepts digestible to even the most skeptical of readers. The plot is engaging and the characters endearing; while it is a bit long and does drag a little bit around three-quarters of the way through, it takes very little convincing to persevere and see how things turn out for our dear protagonist, Connie. Generally I am not a fan of science fiction and tend to avoid that section of bookstores; as such, Woman on the Edge of Time was my first venture into the world of twentieth century feminist science fiction. But it certainly will not be my last. Woman on the Edge of Time is a speculative, thought-provoking, and overall highly enjoyable read for sci-fi junkies and feminist theorists alike.
“The gift is growing to care, to connect, to cooperate. Everything we learn aims to make us feel strong in ourselves, connected to all living. At home”(271).
Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (excerpt)
Joanna Russ's "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" (download)