216
MARGE PIERCY
our recent past and present has also brought me beatings, gassings,
danger, repression, fear, separation, demands, condemnation,
physical collapse, overwork, exhaustion, petty bickerings, faction
fights, fanaticism, hate mail, objectification, a more complicated
life than I am at ease with, and a gallery of more judges than I
need, presumably on my side but sometimes I despairingly won–
deL I would not trade the worst of it for the isolation and dead–
endedness of the fifties . To live in the fifties and think that the
way this society distributes money, power, resources, prestige, and
dirty work was wrong was to stand up in a stadium during a
football game and attempt to read aloud a poem.
