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"In storybooks, bubehs made cookies and knitted; her grandmother danced like a prima ballerina through the webs of artificial intelligence and counted herself to sleep with worry beads of old lovers" (Piercy, He, She and It 79)
Writing from within the Jewish tradition, Marge Piercy's novel, He, She and It, contributes to the on-going debate regarding gender equality and kyriarchal" conceptions of older women through challenging the inclusion, or exclusion, of the Other including the elder in social institutions. Rather than projecting the Other (including the Older) as alien being, like many science fiction texts, Piercy's Other takes the forms of a gradation of ages of women, and cyborgs. Piercy, born in 1936 and at the time of finishing this article for publication aged 78, creates a text that aptly undermines the masculine-feminine as well as the youth-old age binaries through several characters with a mix of coded characteristics that exemplify superlative human qualities. Piercy also grapples with her own identity, as she herself matures and goes through ageing: that of a JewishAmerican writer coming in to the prime of her stature. While her early books tend to feature younger characters going through consciousness raising as they create the women's movement in Cambridge (Small Changes), and graduate students studying martial arts while struggling to make a living ( The High Cost of Living), more reflective of who she was at the time, this novel features characters who struggle with ageing and lost youth, preferring to maintain a virtual image of themselves as younger than they are at the time of the novel. These choices show that in the writing, Piercy is commenting on her own relationship to age. By contrasting past and future times, she also evidences the need for the Jewish religion itself to progress, age and mature to remain socially relevant in contemporary periods.
In the introduction to Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women's Writing, Lois E. Rubin identifies certain traits that resonate specifically with Marge Piercy. In Rubin's estimation, Jewish women writers: "feel excluded from Jewish observance and spirituality; struggle to be both feminists and practicing Jews; are motivated by their Jewish and female identities to make social change; recreate rituals and rewrite texts to enable women to be...