Piercy, Marge (1936–)

Activist, poet, novelist, and essayist Marge Piercy bridges the personal and the political from feminist, socialist, religious Jewish, and pagan perspectives. Since 1956, when her first poems appeared, she has published 16 poetry collections; 17 novels, essays, and reviews; and a memoir. She collaborated on a play, a novel, and a book for aspiring writers with her husband, Ira Wood. Piercy addresses concerns about gender, social class, race and ethnicity, sexuality, ability, religion, nationalism, and interspecies communication. Craftily, she describes the impact on people's lives, particularly women, of interlocking systems of oppression, and portrays utopian and dystopian visions of the future.

Marge Piercy was born on March 31, 1936, in Detroit, Michigan, to Bernice Bunning Piercy and Robert Douglas Piercy. Her Jewish mother, her muse, taught Piercy how to observe, to develop memory, and to play word games. Piercy tells of the animated environment of the Jewish side of the family, joyful storytelling, and religious and political involvement. She experienced anti-Semitism from her father's Presbyterian Welsh family. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood, Piercy became a streetwise girl. Moving to a middle-class home at age 15, she acquired the room of her own where she started the writer's life.

Early years were formative. Piercy was a voracious and precocious reader. During adolescence, she read works of influence by the Brontë sisters, Sayers, Hemingway, Whitman, Marx, and Freud. Befriending a Wyandotte man, she acquired strong sympathy for Native American cultures. Mystical experiences led her to feel oneness and kinship with all living things, but as a Jew, she experienced being an outsider.

Young Marge Piercy did not see herself as having social graces or able to behave as expected of women in the 1950s. She graduated from the University of Michigan and completed an M.A. at Northwestern University, dropping out of a restrictive Ph.D. program. Influenced by her mother's and grandmother's women-identified outlooks, she continued to express the female experience. By the late 1960s, twice married, having traveled and lived in major cities, and having been involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements, she became a spokeswoman for the feminist movement.

Poems by Marge Piercy reflect central concerns of women such as sexual violence and rape, female power and self-determination. She speaks of the body and biology, of love and sexual passion. Her poetry reveals a deep connection and reverence for nature and change.

Piercy's novels focus on themes relevant to social justice and are rich in stories of ordinary and extraordinary women. To create, the author engages in extensive research; her best-selling novel about the dehumanizing effects of war, Gone to Soldiers, documents historical events taking place in the United States, Europe, and the Pacific.

Critic Kerstin W. Shanks describes Piercy's work as following the mandate tikkum olam, the repair of [Page 1123]self and the world. Marge Piercy does it while tending to gardens and cats in her Wellfleet, Massachusetts, home. With Ira Wood, she teaches about writing and runs Leapfrog Press.