Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone (born Jan. 7, 1945), (also called Shulie, or Shuloma) 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, an important and widely influential feminist text.[1]

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 into a radical feminist theory of
politics.[7] Firestone also acknowledged the influence of Lincoln H. and Alice T. Day's Too
Many Americans (1964) and the 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich. It
became a classic text in second-wave feminism in the United States.

Firestone argued that gender inequality originated in the patriarchal societal structures
imposed upon women through their biology; the physical, social and psychological
disadvantages imposed by pregnancy, childbirth, and subsequent child-rearing.[8][9] She
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 biologically determined positions in society. 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.[10]

So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the
underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of
production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass
(women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of
ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility -
the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of child-bearing and child-
rearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the
economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so 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. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud's 'polymorphous
perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the
species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial
reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however
one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would
give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any
remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The
division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through
cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.
—Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

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.[11] The book influenced
American novelist Marge Piercy's imaginative utopia, Woman on the Edge of Time.[12] But as
Hilary Rose writes,[13] "As a socialist feminist Piercy is sensitive to issues of class; her
involvement with the US radical science movement, engaged in the struggle against scientific
racism, added anti-racism to her political agenda long before white feminism began to give up
its taken-for-granted Eurocentricity, and gave a sophistication to her analysis of science and
technology lacking in Firestone."

While some white academics in a new generation[14] celebrate Firestone for purportedly
anticipating the work of Donna Haraway, progressives and leftists like Elizabeth V. Spelman,
Linda Martin Alcoff, Angela Davis, and bell hooks object to the white supremacist
assumptions in Firestone's classic work. Spelman, a practitioner of critical race feminism,
argues that Firestone's claim that "racism is sexism extended" encourages "white solipsism" (a
term borrowed from Adrienne Rich) and is a "dangerous mistake". [15] Spelman also investigates
the white supremacist and patriarchal character of somatophobia (fear and loathing of the body)
in general, a preoccupation she identifies as the principle content of The Dialectic of Sex.[16]
[17]
Progressive and socialist feminist intellectuals and activists, from Angela Davis and
[18]
Margaret A. Simons in the 1970s to bell hooks[19] in the 1990s, have criticized Firestone's
work for racist contempt, fear, loathing, and abundant stereotypes, "ethnocentrism", "historical
myopia" and historical innaccuracy.

Combined with an elaborate race theory developed from a metaphor of combined

Freudian and Biblical origins "stretched to the breaking point and filled with ironies and
stereotypes",[20] the eugenics proposals in The Dialectic of Sex evoke a racialized vision of
impending "overpopulation" which places the book in the tradition of feminist racial hygiene
associated with Margaret Sanger and Charlotte Perkins Gilman[21][22]:

Do the black militants who advocate unchecked fertility for black women allow
themselves to become burdened with heavy bellies and too many mouths to feed? One gathers
that they find contraception of some help in maintaining their active preaching schedules.
—Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex p. 179

The combination of Malthusian terrors of "this dangerously prolific reproduction" [23] of

"too many mouths" and the futuristic dreams of individual liberation through technology has
drawn criticism to The Dialectic of Sex from neoconservatives like Midge Decter[24] (perceiving
the proposed eugenics programs as a means to attack patriarchal traditions) as well as from
across the left-of-center spectrum.[25]

[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).