Woman on the Edge of Time

Women's Press 1997 edition

Woman on the Edge of Time (sometimes abbreviated WOTEOT) is a 1976 feminist SF novel by Marge Piercy.

The basic premise is that of a Latina woman in roughly present time, caught in a nexus of time: a turning point between a nearly utopian, communitarian, feminist, democratic, non-racist, and environmentally sustainable community; and its opposite, an authoritarian, militaristic, technological and deeply exploitative society in which women are subordinate to men and both sexes are exploited within a hierarchy.

This work is wonderfully well-written, and Piercy skillfully interweaves numerous themes: medical paternalism (towards women and people of color in particular), and technology over-leaping human ethics. Woman on the Edge of Time is an important, inspirational, and thought-provoking work of feminist SF, well-written and absorbing.

Original blurb

Connie Ramos is 37, Mexican-American; a loving mother now labelled a child abuser; an heroically sane woman, now declared insane. Drugged, a helpless inmate of a mental hospital, she is offered only one way back to 'normality' -- participation in a mind-control experiment using electronic implantations in the brain. But Connie is also a 'catcher', a natural telepath with the ability to enter a Utopian future of ecological and social harmony. As the doctors close in Connie realises she has a fight on her hands -- a fight in which a future world and her own life are at stake.

Intertextuality

Thoughts on childbirth drawn from Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex

Further reading

• Book discussion group on feministSF mailing list (June 2002)