All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.

Piercy’s line uses the language of “misfit” and “amputation” to describe how patriarchal social arrangements force women to contort themselves to be accepted. The “world” here is not nature but a man-made order—institutions, expectations, and roles—that treats women’s full humanity as excessive or improper. “Amputations” suggests the cost of conformity: cutting off ambition, anger, sexuality, creativity, or independence to fit a prescribed shape. The statement is deliberately sweeping (“all women”) to emphasize structural rather than individual harm, and it reframes women’s discomfort not as personal failure but as evidence that the social mold is violent and inadequate.