Sex Wars by Marge Piercy

I am totally in love with Marge Piercy's writing. I used to buy her books as soon as they came out. But in the last couple of years I've been slacking. So I've just finished reading Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period and I loved it, of course.

She makes obvious the commonality between activist women of 130 years ago and activist women of today. Piercy know activism because she has been and continues to be an activist. Here's her comment on the reason she chose to examine the later half of the 19th Century:

"I was attracted to the era after the Civil War because I found it had so many of the same divisions and conflicts as our own time. The role of women in the public sphere and in the family, the degree to which free sexual expression was valuable, permissible, tolerated or condemned, whether Church and State should continue to be separated or whether Christianity should be the official religion, as opposed to all the other religions found in the States – these are all deep divisions in our own time as they were then."

Class issues, sexual issues, race issues, labor issues all came crashing together for the activists then just as they force activists today to question our assumptions and broaden our horizons.

Women got screwed royally back then and I suppose the novel will provide fodder for those who haul out the "women have always been oppressed" line. What's valuable to me, however, is how Piercy shows that strong women survive and thrive, especially when they have the ability to analyze their oppression and figure out who is an ally and who is a self-serving git.

I'm going to be re-reading bits of this book and will perhaps post more of my responses. Mostly, I'm reveling in the sheer comfort and delight of spending time with a writer who understands feminism and classism and life in ways that are so familiar to me.

Serendipity on the Internet

Brownfemipower is writing a series on Radical Women of Color Theorists that began with Lee Maracle. BFP is helping us learn there are more than just two (Audre Lorde, bell hooks) radical women of color theorists in the world.

Intrigued, I googled Maracle and found an article in Trivia magazine called "The Lost Days of Columbus". Great quote:

Columbus came from a “throwaway” world. A “get rid of them” culture. We don't.

I'm unfamiliar with Trivia: Voices of Feminism magazine. So I clicked on current issue and found a wonderful poem by my favorite writer, Marge Piercy, called "Blue Mojo". This is a poem Piercy wrote for her friend, Audre Lorde.

Here's a portion:

We were Amazon raiders dusty from battle,
feisty, thumping, hope riding
our shoulders like a screeching parrot.

After you lost your first breast
you joked that now you were a true
Amazon. You were always true.

Writing by or about Lee Maracle that I found on the internet:

I am Native. I am Woman. I am.
Article from the McGill Daily

Some Words on Study As a Process of Discovery
Coming to know is connected to and a result of the process of seeing, thinking and considering phenomena, subject or text and either challenging and either believing or transforming that phenomena, subject or text, based on your particular culture of origin.

The Lost Days of Columbus
"I return Christopher to those who would adore him. I give him back to those who cling stubbornly to throwaway ways."