Teaching Utopia after the Election
Once again, my husband and I had the conversation:
“Don’t look at your phone. Try to sleep. We won’t know anything until the morning.”
I agreed that was the right thing to do and fell asleep at 11. Two hours later, I woke up feeling rested, mind alert. Outside my house the London streets were quiet and dark. I thought it was safe to glance down, imagining the first results showing America was electing its first woman president. Instead, the red line rose above the blue on my phone screen.
Two hours later, I was in my kitchen, reading my phone, feeling sick. That afternoon, I was scheduled to introduce my students to Marge Piercy’s 1979 novel, Woman on the Edge of Time for a seminar on speculative fiction and how women have used it to imagine change.
When I planned the class, I had no idea that the book and this moment would coincide. We had read Christine De Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, written in 1400, Rokeya Hossein’s Sultana’s Dream from 1905, both stories of women who fall asleep in misogynistic times and are taken into another, more just world by visiting female spirits; we had explored Pauline Hopkins hopeful afro-futurist and Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman’s queasily eugenicist stories of adventures to undiscovered lands. We had learned that women throughout time and in different cultures have used literature to reframe what troubles them into visions of what might be better.
This class has been a favourite group: sixteen young women from the States but also China, Denmark, Brazil, England, and one young man. Each student has done the reading, engaged in the discussion, participated in co-created meaning-making. I had overheard them talking about sending in their vote. Like most of their peers, they were all supporting the Harris/Walz ticket.
What was I going to say to them the next morning?
I spent those blurry hours before dawn fighting my horror and writing my lecture notes, exploring articles about women’s history in the US from 1915 to 1991, particularly about the era when Marge Piercy was at her most prolific, the 1970’s and 80’s. As I raked over narratives and facts that I thought I had already known, I began, slowly, to gain courage for what lay ahead.
American women got the vote in 1920, 60 years after the first petition to extend the franchise was brought to the UK Parliament and 40 years after Belva Lockwood ran for President of the US on behalf of the Equal Rights Party. According to the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum website, in 1920 no women sat in Congress or the Cabinet. In 1970, two years before Gloria Steinem founded Ms, women could not get credit cards without a male co-signature; rape in marriage was legal and the gender wage gap was 59 cents on the dollar.
When I looked back on American history, I saw that tremendous gains had been made in human rights — for women and for those kept out of power by their ethnicity or shade of skin. These gains had never been granted easily, and there have been many reversals, many moments of pushing back under what struggled so hard to come to the surface. This pattern was true around the world, though millions have died violently simply for being who they are.
Piercy’s character, Connie, comes out of a time of restricted access to work, education and self-worth for many Americans. She is a working class, Mexican American woman. She has a fierce desire to flourish, but many things are stacked against her. One terrible mistake has led to a series of incarcerations in Bellevue, a state mental institution described as a Kafkaesque locked box from which she cannot escape. She does have the ability to mind meld with Luciente, a character from the future — and it allows her to travel to 2137, to what was once the United States.
In this future world, everyone contains the genetic threads of many origins. People live in small, self-sustaining cooperative communities that combine advanced technologies with agricultural small-holdings; each person is seen as a unique gift to the community and mental health is one of many creative arts nurtured and reverenced.
As Connie’s own life takes a turn for the worst, she begins to discover that this kind, joyful and interesting place is in conflict with an alternative future. In this other future, she meets the mistress of a minor military commander; kept in a tower she never sees the outside world. She distracts herself with a constant stream of virtual entertainment screened on the walls ; cyber-enhanced private police enforce the threat of being sold for organs for any infraction against the male-dominated hierarchy. The woman eats ultra-processed packaged food delivered through a hole in the wall; her main desire is more plastic surgery to enhance her sexual allure.
Forty years after first reading the book, I could see that both futures were not only still possible, but were being born now. Luciente tells Connie that some moments are inflection points in time when the future can go in more than one direction. It was very hard not to feel that the vote that was making me feel sick was about people freely choosing the dark dystopia over the potentially joyful utopia.
Was this the worst thing to ask my students to read right now?
Temporality is the idea that time is not linear, but is in constant conversation across the past, present and future. Our now can unlock frameworks and perspectives that bring new possibilities and potential not only in the world to come but in the narratives of the past we all share. One scholar explained how you could use this idea from queer theory to explore Piercy’s speculations about the inter-related nature of the past and future.
For millenia, human beings encountered dinosaur bones. They literally could not see them. Then Darwin created a new frame for understanding evolution and people began to discover the remains all around.
I grew up without knowing about the varied lives of women in the past. The social change begun in the late 1960’s brought new eyes for reading history. Huge numbers of scholars, scientists, artists, critics, writers uncovered lost stories that show how rich our human potential has been, how many ancestors exist for alternative ways of being, how Luciente exists not only ahead but also behind us.
I wanted to share something about the origins of the book my students might not know. I grew up spending summers in Provincetown, not far from where Piercy lived on Cape Cod; Ptown in the 1970’s was full of a DIY woman-centric culture: art collectives and book stores and small businesses and hospitality aimed at women that were part of a much larger movement reaching from consciousness raising groups to the Boston Women’s Health Collective, publishers of Our Bodies Ourselves, the book that guided me to life in a female body.
This past led directly to our moment in time, passionately engaged with the words of writers who were trying to get us to imagine change that still matters: how to apply technology to live peacefully and sustainably, to build care networks and communities, to become stewards and lovers of our shared planet, to live as equals and to honour our bodies without fear.
When I got to work, I could see that my students were as tired as I was and felt as dispirited. One told me that she, too, wondered how she could read Woman on the Edge of Time at this cliff’s edge moment.
I told them we would take it easy and be kind to ourselves. As we looked at the timeline leading up to Marge Piercy’s life and work —the first in her family to go to university, author of fifteen novels and seventeen collections of poetry, an activist and communitarian — we forgot where we were and became deeply curious time explorers. We read sections of the opening chapter out loud and talked over the connections between Piercy’s book and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which we had read earlier.
One student said, “It is great to read about Connie’s fierceness, her anger, after those women of Herland,” so insipidly calm and sweet. Are monsters born or made we wondered? Connie’s circumstances lead her to a terrible act of violent resistance, but like the creature in Shelley’s book, she was born to love and seeks connection, even in her worst moments.
Our moment of utopia together, in a warm classroom in an old brick building in a park in London, was fragile, fleeting. The university where I work has killed the Humanities programs; this was my last chance to discuss this particular collection of books, speaking to each other across the ages, to a group of open-minded young people.
But Piercy’s book is a reminder that each person, each mind, is a pathway to a potential future. Luciente is a plant biologist — a good metaphor for a writer. Each word, each text, is a seed planted, even this story I am writing to an imagined reader, right now. Many seeds die away but some take hold; some hide underground after the fire, waiting for the right conditions to return to life, to grow and spread and flourish.
