Marge Piercy and History from Below: Woman on the Edge of Time and the Revolutionary Wager of the 1960s

Abstract This article analyzes Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) as an expression of 1960s political radicalism and a “history-from-below” perspective. The oppression faced by the novel’s time traveling protagonist, Consuelo Ramos – a victim of the “prison/psychiatric state” – and her struggle in support of a possible utopian future are situated in relation to Piercy’s participation in SDS and the women’s movement in confrontation with postwar US political culture. Consistent with Walter Benjamin’s call to uphold the subversive meaning of radical traditions threatened by historical erasure, Piercy explores contemporary acts of resistance as potentially germinal moments in a longer arc of insurgency obscured and denied by “official” history.