Sex Wars

  “Enjoyable…unusually entertaining…engrossing. In Woodhull and Freydeh, Piercy has created fascinating portraits of women determined to live on their own terms.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “Piercy does beautifully render some of the details of women’s lives in the 1860s.”

  —Naomi Wolf, Elle magazine

  “Fascinating and only too relevant… Piercy has a gift for conjuring the texture of an historical era.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Succeeds remarkably in bringing history textbook characters to fully re alized, fiery, and memorable life.”

  —Hartford Courant

  Also By Marge Piercy

  POETRY

  Colors Passing Through Us

  The Art of Blessing the Day

  Early Grrrl

  What Are Big Girls Made Of?

  Mars and Her Children

  Available Light

  My Mother’s Body

  Stone, Paper, Knife

  Circles on the Water (Selected Poems)

  The Moon Is Always Female

  The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing

  Living in the Open

  To Be of Use

  4-Telling (with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett and Dick Lourie)

  Hard Loving

  Breaking Camp

  NOVELS

  The Third Child

  Three Women

  Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)

  City of Darkness, City of Light

  The Longings of Women

  He, She and It

  Summer People

  Gone to Soldiers

  Fly Away Home

  Braided Lives

  Vida

  The High Cost of Living

  Woman on the Edge of Time

  Small Changes

  Dance the Eagle to Sleep

  Going Down Fast

  OTHER

  So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and the Personal Narrative (with Ira Wood)

  The Last White Class: A Play

  (with Ira Wood) Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir

  Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays

  Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  SEX WARS. Copyright © 2005 by Middlemarsh, Inc..

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-01439-9

  FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2006.

  * * *

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Piercy, Marge.

  Sex wars / Marge Piercy.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-10: 0-06-078983-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-078983-1

  1. Suffragists—Fiction. 2. Women—Suffrage—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.I4S49 2005

  813’.54—dc22

  2005041499

  * * *

  ISBN-10: 0-06-078987-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-078987-9 (pbk.)

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