Woman on the Edge of Time - by Marge Piercy (1975)
I read this novel quite a few years ago, and it has stayed in a special place in my memory ever since. It sure has earned its own review by now.
Woman on the Edge of Time is one of the early feminist SF novels following the pioneering work of Ursula K. Le Guin, appearing in the same year that Joanna Russ published The Female Man. Like in The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, Piercy juxtaposed her peaceful feminist utopia with a violent patriarchal dystopia, to heighten the political message by pointing up the contrast between the two. Like in The Female Man by Joanna Russ, the author shifts between alternative future visions to examine feminist issues from different angles. While Starhawk's two nations occupied northern and southern California, Piercy's future utopia in North America is reached by time travel from the 1970s. The dystopia is reached by a similar, though different channel, and the heroine is presented with the two as alternative possibilities, two diverging lines of causality, depending on choices made in the present.
The heroine is a Chicana living in New York, who is getting beaten up by abusive guys, along with getting screwed by the legal and psychiatric systems. A time traveler from the future appears and takes her to an America with small communities using appropriate non-polluting technology, who raise their children to be free of gender oppression. Her guide to the future looks like an American Indian in a black leather jacket, so she calls him a cholo.
Then they go skinny dipping and she sees the guy has a woman's body, which perplexes her greatly until she realizes that one's body doesn't have to determine one's gender presentation. Meanwhile over in childcare a hungry baby is crying. So the burly bearded childcare guy unbuttons his lumberjack shirt to breastfeed the baby. They explain to the visitor from the 1970s that all gender divisions have been abolished, so now men take hormones so they can breastfeed and share equally in child care.
This sets up a debate on transgender with issues that were being debated by feminists in the 1970s. At first the feminist from 1975 objects: Men have taken everything away from us, now they'll take our womanhood for themselves too? But the future feminists persuade her that the only way to end patriarchal oppression of women is to dismantle all gender boundaries. So I think Piercy should get credit as a feminist thinker 30 years ahead of her time!
The dystopia is sketched with a cartoonish lack of subtlety. Men are hyper-masculine and violent. Women are hyper-slutty and held prisoner in high-rise apartments that have to be dozens of stories high to get above the totally polluted environment.
All this said, the novel is not mainly about feminism and gender; its main purpose in being written was to support the antipsychiatric movement. The ending is a bit of a shocker, but the reader can easily see how the whole course of the novel led up to it and still sympathize with the heroine. The speculative future was used to examine issues that women faced in the present day, including male chauvinism and oppressive psychiatry. The antipsychiatric theme is developed mainly toward the end of the novel. Piercy included an afterword with further information about the movement. I would never have expected that a novel written to advance an explicitly political agenda could also impress me as good literature. But it is! Marge Piercy is a damn good writer, she draws women's lives in vivid, realistic colors, and she tells an absorbing tale.
Woman on the Edge of Time is one of the early feminist SF novels following the pioneering work of Ursula K. Le Guin, appearing in the same year that Joanna Russ published The Female Man. Like in The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, Piercy juxtaposed her peaceful feminist utopia with a violent patriarchal dystopia, to heighten the political message by pointing up the contrast between the two. Like in The Female Man by Joanna Russ, the author shifts between alternative future visions to examine feminist issues from different angles. While Starhawk's two nations occupied northern and southern California, Piercy's future utopia in North America is reached by time travel from the 1970s. The dystopia is reached by a similar, though different channel, and the heroine is presented with the two as alternative possibilities, two diverging lines of causality, depending on choices made in the present.
The heroine is a Chicana living in New York, who is getting beaten up by abusive guys, along with getting screwed by the legal and psychiatric systems. A time traveler from the future appears and takes her to an America with small communities using appropriate non-polluting technology, who raise their children to be free of gender oppression. Her guide to the future looks like an American Indian in a black leather jacket, so she calls him a cholo.
Then they go skinny dipping and she sees the guy has a woman's body, which perplexes her greatly until she realizes that one's body doesn't have to determine one's gender presentation. Meanwhile over in childcare a hungry baby is crying. So the burly bearded childcare guy unbuttons his lumberjack shirt to breastfeed the baby. They explain to the visitor from the 1970s that all gender divisions have been abolished, so now men take hormones so they can breastfeed and share equally in child care.
This sets up a debate on transgender with issues that were being debated by feminists in the 1970s. At first the feminist from 1975 objects: Men have taken everything away from us, now they'll take our womanhood for themselves too? But the future feminists persuade her that the only way to end patriarchal oppression of women is to dismantle all gender boundaries. So I think Piercy should get credit as a feminist thinker 30 years ahead of her time!
The dystopia is sketched with a cartoonish lack of subtlety. Men are hyper-masculine and violent. Women are hyper-slutty and held prisoner in high-rise apartments that have to be dozens of stories high to get above the totally polluted environment.
All this said, the novel is not mainly about feminism and gender; its main purpose in being written was to support the antipsychiatric movement. The ending is a bit of a shocker, but the reader can easily see how the whole course of the novel led up to it and still sympathize with the heroine. The speculative future was used to examine issues that women faced in the present day, including male chauvinism and oppressive psychiatry. The antipsychiatric theme is developed mainly toward the end of the novel. Piercy included an afterword with further information about the movement. I would never have expected that a novel written to advance an explicitly political agenda could also impress me as good literature. But it is! Marge Piercy is a damn good writer, she draws women's lives in vivid, realistic colors, and she tells an absorbing tale.