Shulamith Firestone
Shulamith Firestone was a Canadian-born feminist activist and writer, best known for her influential book, *The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution* (1970). Born in 1945 in Ottawa, Canada, and raised in the United States, Firestone pursued an education in the arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, ultimately earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. Her activism began in the late 1960s when she co-founded significant feminist organizations such as New York Radical Women and New York Radical Feminists, which sought to transform feminism into a movement addressing social and cultural issues, rather than just political rights.
Firestone's work emphasized the idea of gender conflict as a core issue in society, paralleling Marxist theories of class struggle. She argued that women were oppressed by both biological and societal structures, calling for revolutionary changes that included the abolition of traditional family structures and advancements in reproductive technologies. In her later years, she faced personal challenges, including mental health issues, but continued to contribute to feminist discourse through her second book, *Airless Spaces* (1998), which shared her experiences with mental illness. Firestone passed away in 2012, leaving behind a legacy as a pioneering figure in second-wave feminism whose ideas about gender and technology continue to inspire discussions in contemporary feminist theory.
Shulamith Firestone
- Born: January 7, 1945
- Place of Birth: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Died: August 28, 2012
- Place of Death: New York, NY
Canadian-born activist and writer
In her groundbreaking work,The Dialectic of Sex, and in her activism with radical feminist groups, Firestone raised consciousness about the cultural subjugation of women.
Early Life
Shulamith Firestone (SHEW-la-mihth FI-ur-ston) was born in 1945 in Ottawa, Canada. She and her family moved to the United States, where Firestone was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, along with her sister, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. Firestone attended the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a bachelor of fine art’s degree in painting.
Life’s Work
Firestone is the author of two books: The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), a groundbreaking theoretical work, and Airless Spaces (1998), a collection of short stories focusing on the struggle of those with mental illnesses. She was also instrumental in cofounding New York Radical Women (NYRW) in 1967, Redstockings in 1969, and New York Radical Feminists in 1969.
Firestone worked with several other women, including Carol Hanisch, who popularized the phrase “the personal is the political” in a 1969 essay, to develop NYRW. The purpose of the group was to modernize feminism from a cause devoted to achieving political rights into a transformative movement focused on social and cultural change. The organization staged numerous actions to raise consciousness and garner public attention. In January 1968, NYRW staged a mock funeral of traditional womanhood at Arlington National Cemetery to bury traditional female roles and to protest some women’s support of the Vietnam War. The funeral offended some women who believed NYRW was too radical. In September 1968, the group orchestrated a more successful protest at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The Miss America Pageant originated in 1892 as a way of luring tourists to the seashore resort at Atlantic City after Labor Day. Nearly from its inception, the pageant attracted skepticism on the part of individuals concerned with women’s rights because of its apparent fetishization of women as sex objects, especially because of the beauty contest’s popular swimsuit competition. As early as 1935 a talent segment was added to the pageant to counter claims of exploitation. The pageant was controversial for restricting competition to white contestants only, a practice that continued until the 1970s, and it was accused of anti-Semitism. In 1945, Bess Myerson was the first Jewish woman to win the Miss America title.
On September 7, 1968, members of NYRW held a phantom pageant in Atlantic City where they crowned a sheep Miss America, set up a “freedom trash can” into which they disposed their bras, their lipsticks, and copies of Playboy magazine, and they accepted questions only from female journalists. To NYRW the Miss America Pageant symbolized the degradation of women; supporters believed the contest represented female virtue and American wholesomeness.
In January 1969, NYRW disbanded over ideological divisions between radical feminists and socialist feminists. Firestone and Ellen Willis left NYRW to start up Redstockings in February 1969. Firestone left the group in the same year. Later in 1969, after leaving Redstockings, Firestone and Anne Koedt, a former member of The Feminists, organized New York Radical Feminists (NYRF). NYRF’s core ideology focused on male oppression as a conscious activity and women’s unconscious internalization of the subordinate position. This theoretical stance differed both from Redstockings’ so-called pro-woman line of reasoning, which held that men subjugated women and women adapted to these conditions, and the position of The Feminists, who held that women’s subordination was the result of the unconscious acting out of internalized sex roles. Both Firestone and Koedt left NYRF in 1970 over organizational and leadership concerns.
That same year, Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, after which she largely retreated from public life to focus on her visual art. During the 1980s, she experienced schizophrenia and was sometimes hospitalized as a result. In 1998 she published her second book, Airless Spaces, a memoir in fictional stories that describes her hospitalizations and other aspects of her life.
Firestone died on August 28, 2012, at her apartment in New York City's East Village. She was sixty-seven years old. Her survivors included her mother, Kate Firestone Shiftan, and three siblings, Ezra, Nechemia, and Miram Tirzah Firestone.
Significance
Firestone was an important feminist theorist, a veteran of second-wave feminist activism, and a contributor to the New Left. First-wave feminism strove for political rights; second-wave feminism primarily focused on cultural change; and third-wave feminism is both a critique and an expansion of radical feminism. Firestone played a pioneering role in the founding of New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists. Her greatest contribution, however, was the publication of her book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Taking her cue from Marxism and dialectical materialism, Firestone in her book transformed class conflict into conflict between the sexes. Karl Marx viewed history in terms of class conflict: bourgeois and proletariat; Firestone viewed history in terms of conflict between the sexes: men and women. Marx analyzed material relations by applying the labor theory of value; Firestone analyzed material relations by applying the sexual theory of value. Marx advocated collective revolutionary action to abolish capitalism; Firestone advocated collective revolutionary action to abolish patriarchy. Marx discussed alienation in terms of the oppression of workers by owners, private property, labor, and the means of production; Firestone discussed alienation in terms of the oppression of women by men, childbirth and child-rearing, lactation, marriage, and menstruation. Firestone wrote that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be . . . not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”
It is this natural division of labor, based on biological characteristics, according to Firestone, that is the proper object of feminist revolt: “Nature produced the fundamental inequality—half the human race must bear and rear the children of all of them—which was later consolidated, institutionalized, in the interests of men. . . . Women were the slave class that maintained the species in order to free the other half.”
The goals of radical feminist revolution were, therefore, fourfold: liberation of women from biological reproduction and socializing child-rearing; self-determination of women and children; total integration of women and children into all aspects of society; freedom of women and children to do whatever they wish sexually. The means for revolution that Firestone proposed were similarly anticipatory and radical: elimination of the nuclear family, abolition of schools, advances in reproductive technology, and codification of equality. Many scholars, for example, trace Firestone’s promotion of reproductive technology as anticipating cybernetics, human cloning, sperm banks, and test-tube babies. As reproductive technology advances and poses novel ethical questions, her work remains relevant.
Bibliography
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
Firestone, Shulamith. Airless Spaces. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1998.
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow, 1970.
Fox, Margalit. "Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67." The New York Times, 30 Aug. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/nyregion/shulamith-firestone-feminist-writer-dies-at-67.html. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.
Margree, Victoria. "Shulamith Firestone: Why the Radical Feminist Who Wanted to Abolish Pregnancy Remains Relevant." The Conversation, 12 Aug. 2019, theconversation.com/shulamith-firestone-why-the-radical-feminist-who-wanted-to-abolish-pregnancy-remains-relevant-115730. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.
Trueman, Carl R. "Shulamith Firestone Was a Prophet." First Things, 25 July 2024, www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/07/shulamith-firestone-was-a-prophet. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.