As the story progresses the reader learns more about the world of the future. A beautiful world is painted, one without the problems and pains of Connie’s world, very much like a Utopian society, only without the false perfections. Everyone is unique and accepted for being so. As a person from this time, a lot of what they do seems odd, but trying to understand it and reading about the issues it does away with, it becomes easy to accept it all. Except for Connie.
In chapter 5 Connie visits the place where the children of the future are born, in a lab being incubated outside of a woman’s womb. Their reasoning is that it allows them to breed diversity and do away with racism while still maintaining racial diversity. Another reason is that in an effort to achieve equality among the human population, both male and females had to be equal, and the only way to do that was to do away with biological differences. One of those differences being a woman’s ability to give birth. Connie also learns about the three mother system with which the children of this place are raised. All of this is alien to Connie and she does not agree with it.
For every explanation that the people of the future give, Connie argues against. Connie continues to think in the way of someone from the present who cannot see any other way to live their life. As a disclaimer, I am also someone from the present, so some of what will be written here may be biased. on the last page of the chapter (Piercy 98) Connie begins to think about her daughter as well as expressing her thoughts on the futures way of living. She cannot understand how it is that those people can be mothers when they have never raised a child from their wombs, “How could anyone know what being a mother means who has never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart, who has never borne a baby in blood and pain, who has never suckled a child.” She begins to hate them for living their life without the pain and suffering that Connie went through her entire life, for being happier than her. Connie does not see that this world is a better world to live in even if some things are sacrificed to achieve it.
Later on Connie witnesses the name day of one of the children of the future. There she learns the risk that the child will go through in order to become an adult. The society of the future has learned that this is the best way for the development of a person, to go from child to adult and have accepted it as a rite of passage. Connie continues to view this event as barbaric. To her, a child should not be allowed to risk their life for independence, but to them, it must be done.
In the rest of the chapters, Connie is always questioning these things with a sense of disdain, Thinking of these people as mad. Its not until she sees her daughter Angelina (Piercy 133) that her mood changes. Connie was jealous, angry that these people have a better life than her and none of her worries, but when she sees her “daughter” she accepts it, “For the first time her heart assented to Luciente, to Bee, to Magdalena”. Here her “daughter” can live happily and better than she ever would have in the world she was born.
