In the 1970s, impoverished yet intelligent thirty-seven-year-old Mexican-American Consuelo "Connie" Ramos, a resident of Spanish Harlem, is unfairly incarcerated in a New York mental hospital due to her supposed violent criminal tendencies.

She had been recently released from a previous voluntary commitment in a mental institution after an episode of drug-related child neglect, which led her to lose custody of her daughter.

As a result, before being committed, Connie had for some time begun to communicate with ("receive" from) a figure from the future: an androgynous young woman named Luciente.

Luciente is time-traveling from a future (the date is given as 2137), in which a number of goals of the political and social agenda of the late 1960s and early 1970s radical movements have been fulfilled.

Environmental pollution, patriarchy, homelessness, homophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, phallogocentrism, sexism, class-subordination, food injustice, consumerism, imperialism, and totalitarianism have been effectively dealt with in this world, which is governmentally decentralized in a loose version of anarchism.

on the basis of their response to an unjust and harshly stratified class-, race-, and gender-ridden society, future dwellers experience enormous personal freedom and train one another in self-control and ways of producing win-win results in all social situations.

Connie is introduced by Luciente to the agrarian, income-sharing community of Mattapoisett, where children grow up in a culture where they are encouraged to know themselves and their own minds and emotions thoroughly through practicing a type of meditation from an early age ("in-knowing"), in the service of social harmony and the ability to communicate with others without domination or subservience.

This classless, gender-neutral (non-gendered pronouns are used, notably "per" or "person" for "he" or "she"), racial-difference-affirming society is sketched in detail, including meeting and discussion structures that eliminate power differentials as much as possible, the extensive use of technology only for social good, the replacement of business and corporate agendas with general planning for social justice and respect for all human beings' individuality.

A 1970s emphasis on individual freedom can be seen at times: each person lives in a private tent or one-room home, and children develop outside the womb of an individual and are adopted by three "mothers" (of any gender) who guard and teach them only until puberty; every person chooses per own name, and can also choose per's field of study and work, as well as when to disengage from per community, or join a new one; total freedom also applies to one's mental and emotional choices: In this future, world one can check oneself into and out of the equivalent of a sanitorium at will, go into or out of various kinds of therapy, or take a mental break in some other way, and no other person has the right to choose this on one's behalf.

There are limits to this utopia, which threaten always at the margins: the death penalty is imposed on occasion, and war is in the background, but both are considered extreme and unusual measures.

However, after returning to the present, Connie is signed up for an experimental procedure by her brother, one intended to “cure” her illness by releasing chemicals into her brain every time she feels a negative emotion.

"By couching the reality of Connie's visions in ambiguity, the text questions the idealism of utopian thinking while showing that social change nevertheless starts in the realm of ideas.

For example, Connie's friend Skip who has been committed to the mental institution by his father for being gay reminds her of Jackrabbit, a bisexual person who is not only accepted but very popular in Mattapoisett.

Piercy's utopia was noted for "literally embodying every ideal of the counterculture/Movement: ecological wisdom, community, androgyny, ritual, respect for madness, propertylessness, etc.

"[12] At the time, leaving the Sixties behind, American novels generally shared a post-apocalyptic feeling, asking "what are to be the new social and spiritual arrangements now that the old ones are completely shattered?

"[14] Academic reviews, however, placed the novel among the important innovative fiction of the mid-1970s, characteristically works of social realism, all in some way describing a "new consciousness," "even though they don't always use the techniques of verisimilitude, and despite the mythical dimension of their representative characters.

[9] "By her vivid and coherent descriptions of new social institutions, Piercy has answered the famous Cold War dystopias like 1984 and Brave New World which lament that there is no possibility of imagining an anti-totalitarian society.

"[17] The book is often compared with other feminist utopian or dystopian fantasies such as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.