Hull-House Museum and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago present, Marge Piercy in “Sex Wars: the Turbulent times of the first wave of the women’s movement.

Reading from “Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period,”

presentation, conversation and reception to follow program.

Post-Civil War New York City is the battleground of the American dream: an era of vast fortunes and crushing poverty — an era surprisingly like our own, in which some of the most infamous characters in American history collide over the issues of sexuality, censorship, women’s rights, and privacy.

In a sprawling fictionalized history written in the epic style of Piercy’s critically acclaimed Gone to Soldiers, Sex Wars unfolds through the alternating viewpoints of Victoria Woodhull, notorious advocate of sexual freedom and candidate for President of the United States; Anthony Comstock, feared morals crusader who fought to eliminate sexual expression; the free thinking suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and Freydeh, a spirited young Jewish woman from Russia who takes up condom-making to support herself and her unconventional family.

Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women and the classic Woman on the Edge of Time; eighteen volumes of poetry, and a critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time, including the anti-Vietnam war and the women’s movement, and more recently an active participant in the resistance to the war in Iraq.

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