Woman on the Edge of Time

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, wrongful commitment to and medical abuse of patients in a psychiatric hospital, ableism, anti-gay bias, and suicide.

Like many utopian novels of the 1970s, Woman on the Edge of Time attempts to envision what a society with different gender norms might look like. Because many feminists of Piercy’s time located women’s oppression in patriarchal gender norms, Piercy imagines Mattapoisett as a culture where gender is irrelevant, though sex remains.

Connie’s world of 1970s New York has very marked gender roles that tend to privilege men. Femininity is associated with beauty, subservience, and feeling. Masculinity is associated with power, violence, dominance, and rationality. The novel shows this gendering of traits to be inherently linked to the victimization of women. In some cases—e.g., Geraldo’s treatment of Dolly—the victimization is explicitly misogynistic. However, misogyny also underpins Connie’s experiences at the psychiatric hospital, where the patients are mostly women or societally coded as feminine (e.g., Skip, a gay man). Connie imagines the male doctors attempting to cut feelings out of her brain “like a rotten appendix”: “Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel” (307). The extent to which gender saturates Connie’s world is evident in its language; pronouns in Spanish and English clearly designate people as either male or female, with the assumption that this correlates with gender and gender norms.