Marge Piercy’s Conception of a Feminist Utopia in Woman on the Edge of Time Res. Asst. Yiğit Sümbül Erciyes University, yigitsumbul@gmail.com Abstract Published in 1976 as the author’s fourth novel, Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time is a utopian novel elaborating on the controversial issues within the feminist circles of the seventies such as women’s rights and social status in society, gender-related violence, sexism and patriarchal ideology. In the novel, Piercy comments on the humans’, especially women’s, evolution through centuries with examples from two distinct social atmospheres both in the present time and in a utopian future. Focusing on the protagonist’s abilities of time-travel, Piercy presents the reader with two incompatible social structures, depicting the present time as an anti-utopia and the future society as a sexless social environment. While the novel emphasizes issues like patriarchal ideology and the question of sisterhood among working class women on the one hand, it offers a totally different, anti- separatist linguistic realm, in which gender roles are re-defined, on the other. It is clearly deducible from the novel that Piercy takes sides with the future society’s social norms and morals, and takes a very harsh critical stance towards the present times’ patriarchal culture. In this respect, this article argues that Piercy conceives this social satire as her proposition of a better social environment for women and a challenge to the operative, mainstream ideas dominating second-wave feminism. Key Words: utopia, dystopia, patriarchy, sisterhood, feminism, gender roles 1. Introduction Written and first published in the 70s during the radical social, political and feminist movements, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is a utopian novel that gives voice to the author’s critique of her time and to her aspirations for a better society in terms of issues like women’s rights and position in society, the environment, class division, racism and power relations. Piercy’s depictions of the two parallel plots, one centring on the New York of 1970s and the other on an agrarian society of 2137, contradict in their definitions of gender roles, social relations, the relationships between human and nature and human and society. Piercy’s protagonist Connie Ramos, a thirty seven-year-old Hispanic woman confined to a mental institution after a set of charges like child abuse and public violence, expresses the author’s discomfort with her times and her longing for an idyllic, pastoral society where all the ideologies, biases and social structures functioning against women are subverted and re- defined. Piercy seems to have deliberately chosen Connie Ramos as the protagonist of her novel, as Connie is the ultimate example of the contemporary working class woman, victim of multiple abuses like racism and domestic violence, suffering from financial hardships, problematic marriages and being an only parent, and struggling against a system of ideologies that views her as naturally irrational.