Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child – ‘That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!’ – is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut reaction – the assumption that, even when they don’t know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition – is an honest one. That so profound a change cannot be easily fitted into traditional categories of thought, e.g., ‘political’, is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it.
—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”
A revolutionary feminist’s portrayal of life with mental illness – Lidija Haas
There is by now a vibrant and contentious literature on the relationship between political change and mental illness. Does despair breed compliance, or can you fight back harder the less you have to lose? Could a shared cause of psychological suffering become a cause, rallying and even sustaining the sufferers? Must a mind unhinge itself from the social and economic order it inhabits to fully analyze, let alone try to interrupt, the mechanism? When attempting to lead a revolutionary movement, does it help to be a little crazy? Will the attempt drive you that way? How can we calculate the psychological toll of political defeat? Can the long-term, repetitive, one-step-forward-three-back efforts required for political organizing or for psychological well-being ever feel sufficient to the urgent crises they address? Will emotional healing inevitably tend toward adjustment to an unjust status quo, or can it serve revolt? Is solidarity the best cure for individual misery, or should safeguarding one’s own mental health be recognized as a prerequisite for collective action?
If some false binaries lurk here, they are those that inevitably waylay readers of the late radical feminist pioneer Shulamith Firestone, who in her early twenties cofounded several key second-wave groups and publications with the likes of Carol Hanisch (“the personal is political”), Robin Morgan (editor of Sisterhood is Powerful), and the formidable Ellen Willis. Having helped theorize the women’s liberation movement and make it impossible to ignore, Firestone was thrown out by her cohort and eventually spent decades mired in illness, poverty, and neglect. She remains best known for the first of only two published books, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, her incandescent, fundamentally flawed (essentialist, racist), and still evocative 1970 manifesto. Twenty-eight years of silence followed; what was to have been the next project, a sprawling work on women’s art, never appeared. Her second book, Airless Spaces, from 1998, is a set of autobiographical yet insistently alienated vignettes that draw on her repeated hospitalizations for psychosis from 1987 onward: she observes herself, the staff and inmates of the wards, and other “Losers” and “Suicides I Have Known.” Firestone’s books and fate seem to continually invite and resist the inadequate questions with which I began.
These questions are palpable in Susan Faludi’s account of Firestone’s two postmortem services in her quite beautiful 2013 New Yorker article, which serves as the afterword in Semiotext(e)’s rerelease of Airless Spaces. At a memorial service at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Firestone’s second-wave comrade Kate Millett explicitly linked her personal tragedy to a political, collective one. After reading from “Emotional Paralysis,” a piece from Airless Spaces about a woman who leaves a mental institution reduced to wreckage with “no salvage plan,” unable to read, write, act, decide, feel elation or desire, Millett said, “I think we should remember Shulie, because we are in the same place now.” Faludi reports that at the smaller Orthodox Jewish family funeral (to which the feminists were not invited), Firestone’s sister Tirzah found in her political legacy an image of redemption and renewal: “She had children—she influenced thousands of women to have new thoughts, to lead new lives. I am who I am, and a lot of women are who they are, because of Shulie.”
Thousands of feminist offspring, an image affecting in its many painful ironies. Tirzah was pushing back, at the funeral, on their brother Ezra’s sexist characterization of Firestone’s life as tragic because it lacked the steadying consolations of the nuclear family—the love of a husband and children. It seems clear that Firestone’s experience in their family of origin forged both her to-the-death spirit and the specific critique she developed in The Dialectic of Sex. (Along with her mother and five siblings, Firestone was under the thumb of a domineering, zealous father who, during a physical struggle in Firestone’s teens, threatened to kill her, to which she replied, “I’ll kill you first!”) Surely the most literally radical of radical feminist texts—taking on Marx, Engels, and Freud along the way—Dialectic locates the roots of all oppression, of all the ills of human nature, culture, and society (from racism to capitalist exploitation to the death drive to child abuse), in sexual difference and the fundamental oppression of women and children within the biological family. Whereas the nuclear family has often been accused of enabling larger forms of exploitation by softening or sweetening them with the unremunerated labors of love and care, Firestone insisted that it was rotten at the core. The family was the very place where injustice begins and is reproduced, forever, until revolution.
Firestone’s strengths and weaknesses as a political thinker are strikingly linked. Without this totalizing insistence on her own vantage point, through which she claimed to reconfigure world history, Dialectic would not have its existential fury, its still-provocative grandeur and ambition, or its prescience in emphasizing children’s liberation (as Simone de Beauvoir noted not long after its publication) and the urgent need to harness technology for progressive ends. Nor its painful failures to learn from the Black intellectual and political traditions around Firestone. My copy of Dialectic, an edition from 2003, begins with a statement that could be read as a disclaimer, an indictment of the contemporary state of things, or a defiant self-portrait: “The author would like to note that this book remains unabridged and unrevised since its original publication in 1970.”
There is an understandable temptation to read Airless Spaces as a symptomatic depiction of genius brought low, of Firestone’s exhaustion and retreat, and with it that of a whole generation, a whole society. The utopian ferment and action of the ’60s and ’70s, when it seemed possible to transform the world together, had given way to the rapacity and despairing individualism of the post-Reagan era. On the surface, Airless Spaces does seem a painful descent from The Dialectic of Sex: bleakness where there was buoyancy, stasis and recursion where there was urgency and thrust, and loneliness where there was collective work. Self-loathing has replaced overweening confidence and in place of an all-encompassing scheme, fragmentation.
Yet Airless Spaces is a remarkable book, the work of an artist who had continued to analyze and critique the conditions in which she was surviving, to observe in and around them larger struggles and injustices. This time, she came to interrogate herself as well. She found a way to record and politicize the fracturing of her own mind and life. The book shares with Dialectic a bold, absurdist sensibility, and an extremity, a willingness to push a subject—and a reader—further than she may ever have wanted to go. It is unlike most memoirs of mental illness, refusing to dignify or shape or wring meaning from suffering. Written in disciplined parables that build their own formal logic within a tiny space, and that emphasize, both thematically and formally, disconnection and repetition, the book recounts the long-drawn-out undoing of its various “losers,” including many seeming alter egos and fellow-travelers, whether within the walls of institutions or on the outside. They suffer the same things together, frequently exacerbate their own suffering in similar ways, each alone. They endure the hospital routines, the pacing to pass time, the wars for the thermostat, the “brutal merriment” of cops called in to hold them down, the “loveless insomnia,” “the glaring lights-on orderlies with their trays, hunting through the rows of comatose bodies” every morning to take blood, all the ludicrous “activities” one must comply with to gain release.
Firestone constructs a precise kind of tragicomedy in which humiliation, loss, and destruction feel inevitable—and yet are always capable of fresh insult and surprise. Readers encounter the expected disappointment, then some new kind, then more of the old from another quarter, then the recognition that a character’s paltry effort to free or protect herself has boomeranged. The relief of numbness or resignation never arrives. There is tragedy without the sense of individual distinction, comedy without the communal reconciliation. Our dignity and sanity, inextricably connected, rely on small, banal gifts—not least connection to others, which psychosis and institutional life mercilessly attack. You adapt to your appalling circumstances and the adaptation dooms you. Compliance and assertiveness kill in equal measure. “She always made a point of going in as involuntary. . . just for honor’s sake.”
One narrator shares crucial institutional knowledge with a handsome male new fellow inmate but can’t bring herself to ask a small essential favor in return when he benefits from her advice and makes it out before her. Meanwhile she watches him at night, “large and heavy, a husband figure. I could just imagine waking up to that sleeping bulk day after day.” One of many trompe l’oeil images of escape that contain captivity. Another woman wakes up at home “one spring morning filled with light and peace” and life force. She writes a letter to an old friend she hopes to visit, a painter in rural Maine. On the next page the impulse ends with the realization she will never see this friend again, or know where he ended up. In an earlier “fit of madness” that in some way resembles that morning burst of optimism, she has inadvertently cut off this source of air and hope: “I had thrown out not just my pills but my papers and even my Rolodex files and address books in an effort to make a clean start.”
The book’s least successful pieces are those that allow Firestone’s earlier activities into view, featuring recognizable public figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Valerie Solanas, and Diane Arbus. Here the discipline that illuminates the portrayal of hospital and post-hospital life grows slack. A notable exception, in the last section, “Suicides I Have Known,” is a portrait of her eldest brother Danny, in which she considers the connections between their fates, whether his death caused her disintegration and vice versa, whether “it had been my own political limelight”—a rare mention—“that had brought the heat down on him as a warning to me.”
Airless Spaces begins with two wry, cunningly structured pieces, each less than a page. The first is narrated by someone who dreams she is seeking refuge in the basement of a sinking cruise liner. As the other passengers manically party and gorge themselves above deck, she entombs herself in an old refrigerator, to keep breathing in its bubble till the vessel is found (the piece suggests it never will be). Firestone sets up a spiraling, irreducible ambiguity as to what is a rebellious gesture or a suicidal one, a move to reach out to others and a viable future or a permanent cutting off. In the next story, told in the third person, a depleted woman emerges from a mental hospital yearning, after her long stretch shakily wrestling plastic wrappers at every meal, for fresh produce and silverware, “especially knives.” On her first night of freedom, an attempt to unwrap a cauliflower results in the accidental castration of her pinkie finger; found incompetent to feed herself, she is enrolled in meals-on-wheels. The logic of the hospital, its surveillance, repetition, fake food, and relentless succession of plastics, invades her home as well. In trying to choose life, eros, healthy aggression and appetite, the character finds herself not merely flung back into confinement—instead the institution itself is what bursts its bounds, making it out into the world, and back inside her.
At one point in Hannah Proctor’s 2024 book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat—which seeks an approach to struggle that makes room for the intense and ongoing toll it takes—she notes the airless, all-or-nothing perfectionism of Dialectic and movingly makes the case that one might reread it and Airless Spaces with and against one another to create some generative “friction,” opening “a space of ambivalence and strained solidarity among the disappointed,” in which the “seemingly incommensurable scales of the political and the depressive” can be brought closer together.
Both books are arresting, thought-provoking, flawed, valuable, cannily made objects that preserve a sensitive and turbulent mind’s response to crazy-making circumstance. Both appear to expand and collapse time (the claustrophobic exclusion of world events from Airless Spaces is in productive tension with its precise observation of Firestone’s physical and social surroundings—public services, technologies—which date the action even as its universal, endlessly recurring elements are emphasized). And both have qualities allowing them to live and snag and warp and morph in a reader’s mind, to be argued with and mocked and made use of across days and years.
In that, they have something in common with the kind of street-theater protest Firestone and her comrades were so adept at: the invasion of Albany’s legislative hearings on abortion; the burial for traditional “weeping womanhood” at Arlington National Cemetery; the 1969 Counter-Inaugural Coalition March in D.C. (WOMEN: LET’S GIVE THEM BACK THEIR VOTE); the notorious Atlantic City demonstration against the 1968 Miss America pageant, inaccurately immortalized in the term “bra-burning.” The effectiveness of such actions—including the risk of misinterpretation and backlash and co-optation—can be endlessly debated, but protest nonetheless can in mere moments alter consciousness, expand the field of possibility, show you how many thousand others share a sense of what is wrong, how many of those are already working and risking to fight what is elsewhere treated as unalterable.
Airless Spaces may be paradoxically the more ambitious of Firestone’s two books—in that it seems, formally and otherwise, to admit and probe its own limitations. And despite its merciless emphasis on despair and loneliness, Firestone notably chose to dedicate it to Lourdes Cintron. She was, we learn from Faludi, a caseworker at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York who successfully lobbied her employers to take Firestone on despite her lack of health insurance, and she became the lynchpin of a shifting group of women that for years met weekly to offer Firestone practical care, intellectual fellowship, solidarity. Without the support and encouragement of those women, she could not have written Airless Spaces—indeed, once the group disbanded, she began to fall apart again and did not recover. The women considered themselves Firestone’s family in the sense her sister Tirzah meant, not least Cintron, who years before had taken courage from The Dialectic of Sex in her activism for Puerto Rican independence. We know, of course, that political change is never made in isolation. We too easily forget the same is true of most writing that lasts.
Lidija Haas is a writer, editor, and candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City.
Hearing other women talk vaguely about how things “used to be bad for women” saddens me. Things were really bad for women in [INSERT TIME PERIOD HERE]. (Not now though.) There’s always a sense of distance and indifference. An impersonality, an underlying sigh of relief, “Not that bad, could be worse.” I think this is a result of disconnection from each other and our histories. And I don’t think it’s totally our faults.
In my experience going to school in the USAmerican Midwest, I was taught the barest bones of women’s history. It was totally impersonal, cold, not engaging for me at all. We pretty much solely focused on legislature, and that did not thrill me. (Did you know Jane Addams had intimate relationships with women?) But then I started doing “independent study” (reading lesbian feminist writing) once I graduated high school and it was like my brain was exploding. I’m reading The Dialectic of Sex and I still feel that way. I just can’t get enough.
As a result of reading what I’ve read, I feel a stronger connection with women who are different from me because it turns out we have a lot in common. I feel less inclined to say things like “Women had it bad back in the day, but things are better now,” because I know not that much has actually changed, and the concrete changes that have been made are new and fragile. (Women in America only had a constitutional right to abortion for fifty years.)
I think if more women read books like Backlash by Susan Faludi, Loving to Survive by Dee LR Graham, and A Passion for Friends by Janice Raymond, we will have a wider perspective and a better shared understanding of our situation and position in our societies. I also think a lot of women would feel less crazy and alone upon reading women’s accounts of our own lives, what we synthesize from our experiences and observations, and how we can do things differently. That’s the effect feminist work had (and continues to have) on me.
You likely won’t find these books at a bookstore—at least that’s the case where I live—but you can find them online. I use ThriftBooks and Better World Books, and I’ve never received a damaged or illegible copy of a single book I’ve ever ordered, even though they’re super cheap, usually under $10 for a book. (They sometimes have highlighter marks or notes written in the margins, but I like seeing what the previous owner had to say, and I like to write in them too.) Finding and reading these books is well worth the effort. Talking about them and sharing them with other women is well worth the effort, too. I’d like to encourage every woman to get in touch with her intellectual legacy.
The album inspired by the classic feminist book "The Dialectic of Sex" by Shulamith Firestone had its album art censored on iTunes due to the possibility of the red liquid being blood, and is now mostly released with the censored version of the art (Spotify, for example).
There is also much truth in the clichés that "behind every man there is a woman," and that "women are the power behind [read: voltage in] the throne." (Male) culture was built on the love of women, and at their expense. Women provided the substance of those male masterpieces; and for millennia they have done the work, and suffered the costs, of one-way emotional relationships the benefits of which went to men and to the work of men. So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.
-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
if you dont wanna get accused of being a transphobe stop identifying with the transphobic movement. radfems poisoned their own well with nazi talking points
@area51liberationfront gee I wonder who this anon could be from
1. I'm tired of this narrative. Intellectual criticism of gender identity ideology is not inherently transphobic. That waters down the word "transphobic." Instead of being a word to describe hate crimes, now it's just a word to describe intellectual criticism that hurts your feelings. Not a good look! Besides, what material harm has ever come to trans people because of radfems? (Psst, I can name material harm that's come to women because of trans activism!)
2. Radfems are pro-intersex rights, btw. We actively advocate against genital surgery on infants. This falls in line with our campaign to end FGM. Just so you know.
3. Now this is baffling. What "Nazi talking points" are you talking about?? Radical feminism has actually had an abundance of Jewish activists over the years (Shulamith Firestone, Susan Brownmiller, Rabbis Laura Geller and Rebecca Alper, etc). There's literally a book called Jewish Radical Feminism by Joyce Antler (2018), which even says in the blurb that Jewish women liberationists were and are "disproportionately represented in the movement." So please, pray tell. I'm sure all these Jewish women would love to know what Nazi talking points they've been reiterating.
The first women are fleeing the massacre, and, shaking and tottering, are beginning to find each other. Their first move is a careful joint observation, to resensitize a fractured consciousness. This is painful: No matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere. [...] Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know. Others continue strengthening and enlarging the movement, their painful sensitivity to female oppression existing for a purpose: eventually to eliminate it.
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. William Morrow and Company, 1970.
