Victoria Woodhull might be one of the most interesting U.S. feminists many Americans have never heard of — unless they've read Sex Wars, Marge Piercy's historical novel of the Gilded Age in New York City. Woodhull was a suffragist, an advocate of free love and contraception, a newspaper publisher, and one of the first two female brokers on Wall Street (her sister was the other).

As Piercy recounts in her novel, Woodhull declared herself a candidate for president in 1872, decades before women got the vote. So why isn't she better known? "She wasn't very respectable," said Piercy in a telephone interview from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a village on Cape Cod where she has lived for nearly four decades. "People think they know about feminism, but they really only know about Susan B. Anthony."

As demonstrated by her historical and social-realist novels of the French Revolution (City of Darkness, City of Light), World War II (Gone to Soldiers), and the underground left of the 1960s (Vida), Piercy is interested in rescuing for readers those "who have been written out of history." In Sex Wars, Piercy threads together the lives of Woodhull, Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anthony Comstock — the crusading moralist who hounded pornographers and suffragists with equal zeal — as well as an invented character named Freydeh Leibowitz, a Jewish immigrant who makes a living manufacturing condoms in her kitchen. In their lives, Piercy finds themes that are as controversial now as they were in the post-Civil War period.

"All these issues that were hot at the time — immigration, women's rights, the rights of minorities, contraception and abortion, election fraud, the boom-and-bust economy
— they're still hot today," she said. "For example, Comstock's power is still with us;
his laws are still on the books."

Like Woodhull, Piercy has led a life of passionate dedication to the personal and political liberation struggles of her time. Over four decades, she has published 17 collections of poetry and 17 novels, along with numerous guides, essays, and a memoir. Piercy speaks with Latino poet Martín Espada at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, May 20, as part of the Lannan Foundation's Readings and Conversations series.

Born in inner-city Detroit, Piercy grew up in a working-class family headed by a bullying father and a creative, repressed mother. As Piercy recounts in her 2002 memoir, Sleeping With Cats, her father always managed to have a fairly new car, even if the family sometimes had to eat oatmeal for dinner. Piercy ran wild as a young teen; she joined a street gang whose specialty was petty theft, engaged in sexual adventures, battled with her parents, and became a writer at 15 when her family moved into a house where she had, for the first time, a bedroom with a door.

Piercy won a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she won several poetry prizes. She was determined to become a professional writer, to live as a free woman, and to not have children, but after graduation, she found herself trapped in a difficult marriage. She broke free but endured many years of having her writing rejected before publishing her first book of poetry in 1968.

Once she found success, Piercy rejected the temptations of university teaching. "I was very driven and I was willing to give up financial security to be a writer," she said. "I knew that if I had been in an academic environment, I wouldn't have time to do the work."

At turns angry and humorous, Piercy's poems are fierce, personal, political, and attached to the earthy details of life, whether the subject is war or her love of coffee. In "Barbie Doll," a feminist classic collected in many anthologies, a talented young woman endures taunting about her "great big nose and fat legs" until her good will wears out "like a fan belt" and she cuts off her nose and legs. In her casket she is displayed with:

a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie
Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said
Consummationn at last.
To every woman a happy ending.

Determined to survive as a writer, Piercy accepted poetry-reading gigs wherever she could get them, learning decades before t how to perform her work. One early reading turned into a melee when her introducer made a negative comment about Bob Dylan and the audience rushed the stage to attack him.

While writing poetry and novels in the 1960s, Piercy was deeply involved in the anti-war and women's-rights movements in New York City, leading marches, sheltering activists, writing pamphlets, and helping found the North American Congress on Latin America. But overwork and ideological splits among her activist comrades were destroying her physical and emotional health, according to Piercy. In 1971 she and her second husband decamped to Cape Cod, where Piercy built a house and continued the open marriage that began at the insistence of her husband and she came to believe in. Various lovers moved in and out of the household, and the arrangement worked until a jealous lover of her husband's ended the harmony. Piercy and her husband eventually divorced, but she kept the property she had come to treasure.

Piercy found her soul mate in Ira Wood, a writer 14 years her junior who shares her Cape Cod home. The two are devoted to writing, to their own publishing house (Leapfrog Press), to gardening, to alternative Judaism and, most especially, to their cats. She is currently working on a cultural history of roses.

In her poem "The Joys of a Bad Reputation," Piercy humorously describes reactions to her unorthodox life:

Some believe upon meeting a male professor
I drop to one knee and bite his balls.
Then I summon my cortege of mad amazon
shock troops.
We behead all the statues.
We take off our clothes and dance naked on deans' desks.

She doesn't shy away from self-criticism, writing in one poem, "I lack a light touch./I step on my own words,/a garden rake in the weeds./...
/I am earnest into sermons when I should slip away./I ram on."

Piercy is dedicated to the concept of tikkun olam, Hebrew for "repair of the damaged world." She said, "To me it's all one vision. I write poems about nature; I write love poems; I write about people and my cats."

She could also be describing herself in her noted poem "To Be of Use," in which she writes, "The people I love the best/jump into work head first/without dallying in the shalrokes/almost out of sight." Piercy said that the poem has taken on "a curious afterlife" and is often included in funeral services for activists. It ends:

The work of the world is common as mud
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Details
Marge Piercy with Martín Espada, a Lannan Foundation Readings and Conversations event
7 p.m. Wednesday, May 20
Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.
$6, $3 students & seniors
Rebroadcast at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 24, on KSFR-FM 101.1