#shulamit firestone

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114. Shulamit Firestone (1945–2012)

Born Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein into a strict Orthodox Jewish family in Ottawa, Canada, she grew up as one of the six children of a devout but profoundly sexist father. The family moved to St. Louis when Shulamit was a small child and anglicized the family name to Firestone. Subjected to treatment as an inferior class of off spring because of her gender, she rebelled against her family from early on and became a loner for the rest of her life.

Firestone attended a rabbinical college before going to the prestigious Washington University in St. Louis, where she received a BA in 1967.  She also attended the Chicago Art Institute and received a BFA in painting. This was a period of deep radicalization of the feminist movement alongside and eventually in conflict with the male dominated leftist groups developing around the same time. Firestone joined the struggle, first intent on working with the National Conference for New Politics. The Black Panthers were welcomed with open arms at the 1967 gathering. But when Firestone and her colleagues in the New York Radical Women’s group sought the floor to add several points about gender justice to the discussion, she was patted on the head (literally) and asked to go back to her corner: "Cool down, little girl; we have more important things to talk about than women's problems."

Firestone responded by writing the radical Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), which minced no words about the nature of patriarchy and placed the task of feminist activists squarely in the area of reclaiming women’s bodies and sexualities. Building on the Marxist analysis of class oppression, she concluded that patriarchy was inextricably connected to the attempt to control reproductive work and women’s power rested in denying men this control. Her analysis looked into the possibility of a future where reproduction would be separate from sex and sex separated from reproduction. For Firestone, “the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”

The Dialectic of Sex was received with both enthusiasm among a small group of radical feminists, as well as mostly shock and disapproval by most other so-called progressives who believed they were fighting the establishment or “the man,” even as they derided uncompromising feminists like Firestone. Her activism also rubbed other radical feminists the wrong way.  Over the late 1960s she had numerous conflicts with other activists in the New York Radical Women’s brigades and eventually was thrown out of her own group.

A series of familial conflicts further estranged Firestone from her family and left her more and more isolated.  By the mid 1970s she was suffering from schizophrenia and had become unmanageable. People like Kate Millett tried to offer support, but the efforts of her few remaining friends failed to put Firestone on a path towards coping with her illness. When she died in her apartment in August 2012, nobody knew about it for about two weeks after it happened. Her heartbreaking end was a tragic coda to a life of passion and strife on behalf of a goal that many of us still hope for in our lifetime.

A much longer and very beautiful tribute to Shulamit Firestone, “Death of a Revolutionary,” can be found in the April 15, 2013 issue of the New Yorker, written by Susan Faludi.