Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)

Woman on the Edge of Time is a 1976 feminist science fiction novel by American writer Marge Piercy. The novel was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf. Piercy draws on several inspirations to write this novel such as utopian studies, technoscience, socialization, and female fantasies. One of Piercy's main inspirations for her utopian novels is Plato's Republic. Piercy describes the novel as, "if only…"

Plot summary

In the 1970s, impoverished yet intelligent thirty-seven-year-old Mexican-American Consuelo "Connie" Ramos, a resident of Spanish Harlem, is unfairly incarcerated in a New York mental hospital due to her supposed violent criminal tendencies. She had been recently released from a previous voluntary commitment in a mental institution after an episode of drug-related child neglect, which led her to lose custody of her daughter. Connie is caught within the government welfare and child custody labyrinth of 1970s New York City. She is after the first scene recommitted involuntarily by her niece's pimp on grounds of violent behavior, after she strikes him in the course of protecting her niece, Dolly (Dolores), from him. Dolly had sought Connie's protection because she was being forced by the pimp into having an illegal abortion.

One of Connie's chief abilities is her perceptiveness and empathy. As a result, before being committed, Connie had for some time begun to communicate with ("receive" from) a figure from the future: an androgynous young woman named Luciente. Connie retains her visions and her connection, which become more and more real, even while heavily drugged in the mental hospital, based loosely on Bellevue and other mental institutions from that period. Luciente is time-traveling from a future (the date is given as 2137), in which a number of goals of the political and social agenda of the late 1960s and early 1970s radical movements have been fulfilled. Environmental pollution, patriarchy, homelessness, homophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, phallogocentrism, sexism, class-subordination, food injustice, consumerism, imperialism, and totalitarianism have been effectively dealt with in this world, which is governmentally decentralized in a loose version of anarchism.

In contrast to the contemporary 1970s setting in an abusive mental institution where patients are labelled "violent," "incapable," "irrational," etc. on the basis of their response to an unjust and harshly stratified class-, race-, and gender-ridden society, future dwellers experience enormous personal freedom and train one another in self-control and ways of producing win-win results in all social situations. In particular, the subjects of volition and free will, mental institutionalization, and interference in others' willed actions are key to the vision of the utopian future. Connie is introduced by Luciente to the agrarian, income-sharing community of Mattapoisett, where children grow up in a culture where they are encouraged to know themselves and their own minds and emotions thoroughly through practicing a type of meditation from an early age ("in-knowing"), in the service of social harmony and the ability to communicate with others without domination or subservience.

This classless, gender-neutral (non-gendered pronouns are used, notably "person" for he/she and "per" for hers/his), racial-difference-affirming society is sketched in detail, including meeting and discussion structures that eliminate power differentials as much as possible, the extensive use of technology only for social good, the replacement of business and corporate agendas with general planning for social justice and respect for all human beings' individuality. Disputes between towns and regions are settled peacefully through discussion and merit-based competition of ideas, with the winning parties being obliged to "throw a big party for" or otherwise conciliate the losers in each case, in order to maintain friendly relations.

A 1970s emphasis on individual freedom can be seen at times: each person lives in a private tent or one-room home, and children develop outside the womb of an individual and are adopted by three "mothers" (of any gender) who guard and teach them only until puberty; every person chooses per own name, and can also choose per's field of study and work, as well as when to disengage from per community, or join a new one; total freedom also applies to one's mental and emotional choices: In this future world, one can check oneself into and out of the equivalent of a sanitorium at will, go into or out of various kinds of therapy, or take a mental break in some other way, and no other person has the right to choose this on one's behalf. One's field of work is self-chosen, and dicta apply to both one's life path and one's mental or emotional desires, needs, and capacities: "Per must not do what per cannot do" and "Per must do what per needs to do" are applied to both personal/emotional and professional life choices insofar as possible. There are limits to this utopia, which threaten always at the margins: the death penalty is imposed for repeated violent behaviour, and war is in the background, but both are considered extreme and unusual measures.