Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy (born March 31, 1936) is an American progressive activist, feminist, and writer. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time; He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers, a New York Times Best Seller and a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. Piercy's work is rooted in her Jewish heritage, Marxist social and political activism, and feminist ideals.

Life

Family and her early life Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Bert Piercy and Robert Piercy. While her father was non-religious from a Presbyterian background, she was raised Jewish by her mother and her Orthodox Jewish maternal grandmother, who gave Piercy the Hebrew name of Marah.

On her childhood and Jewish identity, Piercy said: "Jews and blacks were always lumped together when I grew up. I didn’t grow up 'white.' Jews weren't white. My first boyfriend was black. I didn't find out I was white until we spent time in Baltimore and I went to a segregated high school. I can't express how weird it was. Then I just figured they didn't know I was Jewish."

An indifferent student in her early childhood, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with the German measles and rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see".

Education Upon graduation from Mackenzie High School, Piercy became the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan, where she received a B.A. degree in 1957. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France. She earned an M.A. degree from Northwestern University in 1958.

Adulthood After graduating from college, Piercy and her first husband went to France, then returned to the United States. They divorced when Piercy was 23.

Personal life and relationships At a young age, Piercy was married to her first husband, a French Jewish physicist. However, the marriage failed when she was 23; Piercy attributes this to his expectations of gender roles in marriage. She and her husband live in Wellfleet, MA. Piercy designed their home, where the couple have been living since the 1970s.

Politics Piercy was involved in the civil rights movement, New Left, and Students for a Democratic Society. She is a feminist, environmentalist, Marxist, socialist, and anti-war activist. an American nonprofit publishing organization that works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.

In 2013, Piercy signed an open letter, described as an "open statement from 48 radical feminists from seven countries". The letter may be interpreted to endorse TERF ideology because it defends the right to exclude transgender women from "women-only conferences". In 2024, however, she wrote on her blog explicitly supporting trans people. "I can’t understand the anger at trans people and LGBTQ etc in general.... Why shouldn’t someone decide they’ve been assigned the wrong gender? What business is it of governments?".

Writing

Piercy is the author of more than seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon Is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999). She has published fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her current—and third—husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.

Piercy's novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the United States as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light was set during the French Revolution. Other novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women, are set during modern times. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.

Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk, as Piercy mentions in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It, 1991) itself postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.

Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone to Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone to Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in the third person after her capture by the Nazis.

Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often centered on feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to social change—what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world. It is rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.

Piercy contributed poems to the journal Kalliope: A Journal of Women's Art and Literature and Earth's Daughters. Piercy also contributed to the collection of essays by women leaders in the climate movement, All We Can Save.

Works

Novels Going Down Fast, 1969 Dance The Eagle To Sleep, 1970 Small Changes, 1973 Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976 The High Cost of Living, 1978 Vida, 1979 Braided Lives, 1982 Fly Away Home, 1985 Gone To Soldiers, 1987 Summer People, 1989 He, She And It (aka Body of Glass), 1991 The Longings of Women, 1994 City of Darkness, City of Light, 1996 Storm Tide, 1998 (with Ira Wood) Three Women, 1999 The Third Child, 2003 Sex Wars, 2005

Short stories The Cost of Lunch, Etc., 2014

Poetry collections Breaking Camp, 1968 Hard Loving, 1969 "Barbie Doll", 1973 4-Telling (with Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie, Robert Hershon), 1971 To Be of Use, 1973 A Work of Artifice,1973 Living in the Open, 1976 The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing, 1978 The Moon is Always Female, 1980 Circles on the Water: Selected Poems, 1982 Stone, Paper, Knife, 1983 My Mother's Body, 1985 Available Light, 1988 Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now (ed.), 1988; 1993 Mars and Her Children, 1992 What are Big Girls Made Of, 1997 Early Grrrl, 1999. The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems With a Jewish Theme, 1999 Colours Passing Through Us, 2003 The Crooked Inheritance, 2006 The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2010, 2012 Made in Detroit, 2015 On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light, 2020

Collected other "The Grand Coolie Damn" and "Song of the fucked duck" in Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, 1970, edited by Robin Morgan The Last White Class (play co-authored with Ira Wood), 1979 Parti-Colored Blocks For a Quilt (essays), 1982 The Earth Shines Secretly: A book of Days (daybook calendar), 1990 So You Want to Write (non-fiction), 2001 Sleeping with Cats, (memoir), 2002 My Life, My Body (Outspoken Authors) (essays, poems & memoir), 2015

Awards and honors

Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, 1992 Bradley Award, New England Poetry Club, 1992 Brit ha-Dorot Award, Shalom Center, 1992 May Sarton Award, New England Poetry Club, 1991 Golden Rose Poetry Prize, New England Poetry Club, 1990 Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize, 1986, 1990 National Endowment for the Arts award, 1978 Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2004