Mothers Yesterday and Mothers Tomorrow, but Never Mothers Today: Woman on the Edge of Time and The Handmaid’s Tale

The stories I have considered thus far explore three disparate subcultures wherein the loss of children is the historic norm, and most of the mothers in question are positioned as deviant and marginalized persons—lesbians, black women, Native Americans, and people of mixed blood. Having begun at these margins, I move now towards what might be thought of as the center or norm. Here too, however, we find that things aren’t so different for many mothers. In the remaining chapters, I turn to fiction authored by two well-known white North American writers, Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood, and the prolific