Shulamith Firestone
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Shulamith Firestone (born 1945) (also called Shulie Firestone) is a Jewish Canadian-born feminist. She was a central figure in the early development of radical feminism, having been a founding member of the New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists. In 1970, she authored The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
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[edit] Life
Firestone was born in Ottawa, Canada at the end of World War II and is the older sister of Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. She attended Yavney of Telshe Yeshiva, Washington University, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a BFA in painting. During her studies at the Art Institute, she was the subject of a documentary film, which was never released. This film was rediscovered, however, in the 1990s by an experimental filmmaker, Elisabeth Subrin, who did frame-for-frame reshoot of the original documentary, having a young actress play the role of Firestone. That version was released in 1997 as Shulie.
While living in Chicago, Firestone joined with Jo Freeman to organize the Westside Group (a predecessor of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union). In October 1967, she moved to New York to help start New York Radical Women. When NYRW dissolved, Firestone and Ellen Willis started the radical feminist group Redstockings in February 1969. Firestone soon left Redstockings (named in reference to the bluestockings, women of intellect in previous centuries) in late 1969 to co-found New York Radical Feminists.
By the time The Dialectic of Sex was published in 1970, Firestone had largely ceased to be politically active. In 1998 she published a haunting account of life, in and out of psychiatric hospitals, titled Airless Spaces.
[edit] The Dialectic of Sex
In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone synthesized the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Simone de Beauvoir to put forth a feminist theory of politics. It became a major text in second-wave feminism in the United States.
Firestone argued that gender inequality originated in the patriarchy forced on women through their biology: the physical, social and psychological disadvantages imposed by pregnancy, childbirth, and subsequent child-rearing[1]. She stated that women must seize the means of reproduction and advocated the use of cybernetics to carry out human reproduction in laboratories - as well as the proliferation of contraception, abortion, and state support for child-rearing - enabling them to escape their biology. Firestone described pregnancy as "barbaric", and writes that a friend of hers compared labor to "shitting a pumpkin". Among the reproductive technologies she predicted were sex selection and in vitro fertilization.
Firestone explored a number of possible social changes that she argued would result in a post-patriarchal society, including the abolition of the nuclear family and the promotion of living in community units within a socialist society.
The Dialectic of Sex continues to be an influential and widely quoted feminist work. Kathleen Hanna, among others, often cites it as a critical work. The book influenced American novelist Marge Piercy's imaginative utopia, Woman on the Edge of Time. It has, however, been critiqued by Angela Davis in Women, Race & Class for its implicit racism.[2]
[edit] Works
- The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (Morrow, 1970, ISBN 0-688-06454-X; Bantam, 1979, ISBN 0-553-12814-0; Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003, ISBN 0-374-52787-3).
- Airless Spaces (Semiotext(e), 1998, ISBN 1-57027-082-1).
[edit] References
- ^ Political Ideologies: An Introduction, Andrew Heywood, 2003, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-96178-1, pp 272.
- ^ Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books, p. 181-182.
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Shulamith Firestone |
- The Women's Rights Movement in the U.S. : A New View, an article first appearing in Notes from the First Year (New York: The New York Radical Women, 1968).
