In Sex Wars Marge Piercy takes on a historical era, as she did in City of Darkness, City of Light (the French Revolution). The time is post-Civil War up to 1915, the place, New York City, and three of the four main characters are real people--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, and Anthony Comstock. The fourth character, fictional, is Freydeh Levin, a Jewish-Russian immigrant from "The Pale." (Yes, that's the origin of the expression beyond The Pale.) In case you're wondering about the book's unfortunate title, Stanton and Woodhull were women's rights advocates working for female suffrage and Comstock was the head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a fanatical crusader who destroyed lives and livelihoods trashing bookstores, saloons, and even condom makers. The Comstock Laws are still on the books in New York.Several other historical figures appear in Sex Wars: Madame Restell, New York's premier abortionist of the time, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her siblings--all drawn with meticulous accuracy. Several times I found myself propelled by curiosity to Wikipedia to see what was real and what was fictional, and found the stories hewing closely to truth. What Piercy makes up, of course, are interiors--people's thoughts, motivations and feelings as they live through history. Piercy is an avid researcher, and on her website she says she dug up too much information to include in the novel, so she's created a Power Point lecture available for group presentations.In City of Darkness, City of Light the author took the same approach to the story of the French Revolution; and in previous books she often told the story from multiple points of view, most notably in Gone to Soldiers. While I loved both these novels, I was sometimes disappointed when the narrative switched point of view, as I preferred that of a different character. In Sex Wars however, this never happened: every character is as compelling as every other, so I was perfectly happy no matter whose voice predominated--proof that Piercy has attained mastery over this style of storytelling. Other writers who use it don't always carry it off; sometimes every character's voice is numbingly the same--whereas Piercy's characters are clearly identifiable.The era portrayed here bears uncanny similarities to our own time, and Piercy says that's why she chose to explore it. The event that parallels to the present the most is the Presidential race in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes stole the election from Democrat Samuel Tilden, with the help of several Supreme Court judges. This was one of those passages that had me scampering to Wikipedia; sure enough, Marge told it true. So how come we didn't hear about this during the hijacked election of 2000? Or did I alone miss it? I've missed so much, and haven't we all? Some of our woefully lacking education can be blamed on public school methods, with their relentless recitation of history as a series of wars and treaties, crap that bored the hell out of me so I tuned it out. Piercy, on the other hand, brings her story to these pages, including small and large details of domestic life: the food they cooked and how, the clothes they wore and the tools used to wash and iron them. These details not only fill a gap in American history, they add spark and color to the narrative.On its website Harper Collins posts a Sex Wars "reading guide," of the kind fashionable in book groups today. One question asks readers their favorite character. My answer was, without hesitation, Victoria Woodhull. All I knew of this women's rights' advocate was her name. In Sex Wars I learned she was a sex radical who espoused some of the same beliefs as Carol Queen or Susie Bright; that she and her sister were the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street; and that she was the first woman to address Congress and the first woman to run for President--before women were even granted the vote. Several times in her life (yes, I checked) she was broke, financially and spiritually--once when Comstock threw her into prison for writing about sexual issues--but each time she recovered. As the Stanton character says near the end, "Victoria had been forced to retreat from her more radical positions because she actually lived them."There are some flaws; too much is repetitive, and some characters seem exaggerated, particularly Comstock, who comes off like an extreme version of Jerry Falwell (then again, he probably was). As she gallops to a conclusion the writing is more like reportage than storytelling, and the end is a bit too neat, with each character's life summed up tidily. But such minor flaws are tolerable in an otherwise compelling page-turner. Another era beautifully Pierced! (I couldn't resist.)