Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy

Today I'm looking at a science-fiction book by Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time. In the introduction, Piercy explained that the book was written during the second-wave feminist revolution of the late 1960's and 1970's and put it within the genre of feminist utopian literature that sought to critique current society and provide alternatives for the future. In this rerelease some forty years later Piercy argues that her book has become even more relevant because of the decreasing resources available for mental health, the increasing wealth inequality, and the threat of environmental destruction. And on some level, I have to agree.

This book focuses on Connie, a Mexican-American woman in her mid thirties, living on welfare in New York. Connie has been abandoned by her family, her daughter taken away by the state, and been in and out of government institutions for a significant part of her adult life. Recently Connie has been seeing an individual who identifies themselves as Luciente. Luciente claims they come from the year 2137, a society that has returned to a closer-knit and more ecologically sound way of living. Connie and Luciente are able to connect mentally across time and communicate, learning about each other's society.

The main conflict comes from a fight Connie had with Geraldo, her niece's pimp. Geraldo knocks Connie out and gets her recommitted to an insane asylum. The rest of the book focuses on Connie trapped within the ruthless institution determined to crush her into a predetermined form of socially acceptable. This is the part where Piercy's research especially shines, she says she got workers to sneak her into mental institutions and did countless interviews with both workers and patients to get insights into the mental health system. Through her writing Piercy manages to capture the tedium, the helplessness, and the desperation of people trapped in a system that sees them as a problem to be fixed, rather than people to be helped. With the evocative portrait Piercy creates, it really shows the deep-seated problems of the mental health system and if not how it needs to be reformed, at least revealing the desperate need for reform.

I will say that in my experience there seems to have been changes for the better in the past forty years, but my experience is far, far different from Connie's. First, I'm a middle-class white man opposed to a poor latinx woman so people are more likely to listen to my thoughts and concerns than Connie's just because of background. Second, I've spent the equivalent of a long weekend in a mental health institution while Connie spends at least one year and probably longer trapped in an institution. So while the glimpse I saw looks a lot better than what Connie experienced, my own experience was very different from Connie's and it's certainly possible that things haven't improved for many other people.

As for the life in the future that we saw, I feel like that's weaker compared to Piercy's commentary on society in the seventies. There are some interesting ideas but a lot of things are left a little too vague and just raise more questions, specifically the practice of defense. The people in the culture of 2137 volunteer to spend part of their time working on defense, fighting against enemies. It's implied that these enemies are last vestiges of the old corporation-dominated way of doing things and we get to see a little bit of that different society, but I would have liked just a little bit more exposition.

Overall I think the time travel and alternate society that Piercy establishes in her book are the less interesting parts of the book. The best parts, for me, were Connie's struggles against the system and revealing just how a woman of color can be disempowered by a system that sees her as a problem rather than a person. If the future society is underdeveloped and maybe a little confusing Connie's own story more than makes up for it. Definitely worth checking out.

- Kalpar

All the Single Ladies, by Rebecca Traister

Today I'm looking at a book that happened to catch my eye at the library, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. I wasn't sure what it was about but I thought it would be something interesting to look at. In this book Traister chronicles the growth of single women as a demographic in the United States, especially within the past three decades. In many cases this is because women are choosing to forgo marriage for a variety of reasons, although not necessarily keeping them from having children. And on the surface it looks like the situation is improving for single women in the United States, but as Traister digs deeper it reveals there are a lot of issues and women are the targets of backlashes by conservative establishments.

The sources for this book are rather eclectic. Partly it's an autobiography of the author, talking about her own experiences, as well as the experiences of her close friends and family. Partly it's made from interviews with other contemporary women from various walks of life, and partly it draws upon a variety of historical sources, touching on the life of women from the colonial era to the present. Because the selection is so wide, I don't feel like there's just one narrative that Traister presents. And truly, the story of women in America is not a single narrative, but many narratives based on race and class. What was true for white upper and middle class women was not true for working class whites or the disproportionately poor non-white populations in the United States. And in an era of increasing income disparity, the experiences of upper class highly educated white women is very different from the experiences of working class women with only a high school, or sometimes even less, education.

Because of the diffuse sources of the book, which are highly anecdotal, I'm not sure if this book is really good as a source of information for the single woman's experience. There are statistics and mapping of general trends, including an increase in the average marriage age while the average age of first birth has now gone below the marriage age. Which means more women are having babies without getting married first. There are a variety of reasons for this, whether women who don't want their marriage to end in divorce or women who just don't see the economic benefit to getting married. In addition, women are having on average less children, leading to a declining birth rate in the United States, at least compared the the post-war Baby Boom which Traister argues is an aberration and should not be utilized as a baseline for accurate statistics in the United States.

All of this has led to some conservatives going into a full-blown panic and accusing the decline of America on unwed mothers. Again and again, conservatives argue that people need to get married before they have children, a woman's place is as a wife and mother in the home, and she should produce lots of babies. Conservatives also argue strongly against the use of contraceptives or abortion, seeking to restrict women's reproductive rights. But as Traister counters, there are considerable problems with this viewpoint. First it removes women's autonomy and places them in an economically dependent state on men. Second, it's unrealistic, especially with income stagnation for many American workers. And for many women who fear abusive or destructive relationships, marriage and the potential for painful divorce does not make an appealing future. These women are not the ''welfare queens'' of Reagan-era rhetoric, but working women who are choosing to remain single for a variety of reasons.

Overall I think this book is informative but I don't know if it does a great job of showing the larger picture. There are a lot of interesting stories about people in this book and how culture tries to force women into the box of heterosexual marriage, but because some of the evidence is so anecdotal I don't know how well it works on the macro scale. But it definitely does a good job of showing the complexity and diversity of life for American women in the current era.

- Kalpar