45 pages • 1 hour read
Marge PiercyWoman on the Edge of Time
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Science Fiction
Content Warning: This section discusses racism, sexual violence, abortion, wrongful commitment to a psychiatric hospital, and anti-gay bias.
Though science fiction is sometimes regarded as a male-dominated domain, many pioneers in the genre have been women; the novel often credited with inventing the genre, Frankenstein (1818), was the work of British Romantic writer Mary Shelley. Many of these authors were drawn to the genre because it provided space for imagining different gender norms or social roles. In the 20th century, for example, science fiction provided an outlet for women frustrated with the traditionalism of post-World War II society. Scholar Lisa Yaszek argues that these examples of “galactic suburbia” “provide us with important insight into women’s representations of the relations between science, technology, and gender” (Yaszek, Lisa. Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction. Ohio State University Press, 2008, p. 20). She also notes that much of the sexism these female writers faced reveals how even the most “openminded” readers—those drawn to speculative fiction—could still be constrained by social mores.
Today, Woman on the Edge of Time is recognized as a groundbreaking novel, and Piercy speaks in the Introduction about her interest in utopian fiction, writing, “Feminist utopias were created out of a hunger for what we didn’t have at a time when change felt not only possible but probable” (viii). Other writers of that time included Ursula K. Le Guin, whose The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagined a completely androgynous planet, and Joanna Russ, whose The Female Man (1970) also follows a time-traveling female adventurer through possible future worlds. Pioneering Black sci-fi writer Octavia Butler used the genre to explore race as well as gender, especially in her acclaimed novel Kindred (1979). However, it was not until the early 21st century that academic scholarship began to recognize the crossover between this kind of genre writing and feminist theory.
Cultural Context: Second-Wave Feminism
Second-wave feminism was an era of activism targeting gender inequality that roughly spanned the 1960s to the 1970s. Marge Piercy was involved in the movement, and her novels, including Woman on the Edge of Time, reflect the movement’s concerns. Piercy uses the utopian society of Mattapoisett to envision a world where biological sex remains but gendered social roles have disappeared, thus imagining how patriarchal gender norms in the real world could be modified. Second-wave feminism addressed a variety of issues, from the presence of women in the workforce to laws surrounding rape; however, its emphasis on reproductive rights, including the right to contraception and abortion, is particularly relevant to Woman on the Edge of Time. Piercy’s Mattapoisett uses technology to do away with biological childbirth, imagining a society where women are free not only from unwanted pregnancy but also from the dangers and limitations of pregnancy itself. While not all feminists then or since have agreed that biology is burdensome, Piercy’s work resembles the ideas of theorists like Shulamith Firestone, who argued that technology could free women from some of the constraints imposed by human reproduction.
Second-wave feminism’s legacy was mixed on issues of race, class, orientation, and other axes of privilege. Although the movement gave rise to organizations like the Combahee River Collective (1974), which identified as Black, lesbian, and socialist, such groups often arose in response to the perceived exclusivity of mainstream second-wave feminism. Indeed, the work often credited with kickstarting second-wave feminism, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), addressed the plight of housewives and therefore presumed heteronormativity and middle-class status (as working-class women frequently had no choice but to labor outside the home). Piercy, however, strives to showcase not only gender inequality but also other forms of oppression in Woman on the Edge of Time. Connie’s experiences in 1970s America are shaped by her low social status as a poor Mexican American woman—a confluence of race, class, and gender. Her brother, Luis, enjoys more respect because he is wealthy and male. However, Skip is a wealthy white man who is committed to a psychiatric hospital because of his sexual orientation. In this sense, the work anticipates the idea of “intersectionality,” a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Intersectionality, which refers to the way that an individual’s different identities, including gender, race, religion, and class, can compound their experiences of oppression or privilege, has been highly influential in later waves of feminist activism.
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