The main character in Marge Piercy's book Woman on the Edge of Time is Connie, a poor latino woman who finds herself stuck in a mental institution. Once there, she makes a connection with people from the future, and gains new insight on the problems with her own society. The connection she makes in the future is of a utopian society that has created equality, in part by changing the relationship between gender and language. For example, this future society has replaced gender-specifying pronouns with the gender-neutral pronoun 'per'.

Marge Piercy, is a Detroit native. She attended the University of Michigan on a scholarship and was the first in her family to attend college. She was born in 1936 and wrote Woman on the Edge of Time about 30 years later.