Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone
Firestone c. 1970
Born Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein[1]
January 7, 1945
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Died August 28, 2012(2012-08-28) (aged 67)[2]
New York City, New York, United States
Alma mater Washington University (BA)
Art Institute of Chicago (BFA)
Notable work The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)
Movement Radical feminism, second-wave feminism
Parent(s) Kate Firestone (née Weiss) and Sol Firestone
Relatives Tirzah Firestone

Shulamith "Shulie" Firestone (January 7, 1945 – August 28, 2012)[2] was a Canadian-American radical feminist. A central figure in the early development of radical feminism and second-wave feminism, Firestone was a founding member of three radical-feminist groups: New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists.

In 1970 Firestone authored The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Published in September that year, the book became an influential feminist text.[3] Naomi Wolf said of the book in 2012: "No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory, second-wave landmark."[4]

Early life and education

Firestone was born Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein[1] in Ottawa, Canada. She was born on January 7th, 1945[5] and was the second of six children and the first daughter of Orthodox Jewish parents Kate Weiss, a German, and Sol Feuerstein, a Brooklyn salesman.[6] In April 1945, when Firestone was four months old, her father took part in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.[6][lower-alpha 1]

When she was a child, the family Anglicized their surname to Firestone and moved to St. Louis, Missouri.[6] Her father had converted to Orthodox Judaism when he was a teenager and, according to Susan Faludi, he exercised tight control over his children, with the zeal of a convert. One of her sisters,Tirzah Firestone, told Faludi: "My father threw his rage at Shulie." She railed against the family's sexism; Firestone was expected to make her brother's bed, "[b]ecause you're a girl", her father told her. Laya Firestone Seghi, another sister, remembers father and daughter threatening to kill one another.[6]

Firestone attended the Rabbinical College of Telshe, near Cleveland, before receiving a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and, in 1967, a BFA degree in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).[9][1] In 1967, during her studies at SAIC, she was the subject of a student documentary film. Never released, the film was rediscovered in the 1990s by experimental filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin, who did a frame-by-frame reshoot of the original documentary, with Kim Soss playing the 22-year-old Firestone. It was released in 1997 as Shulie,[10] winning several awards, including the 1998 Los Angeles Film Critics Association award.[11][lower-alpha 2]

Activism

New York Radical Women

In October 1967, Firestone moved to New York City and co-founded New York Radical Women (NYRW). The first and only national convention of the National Conference for New Politics was held that year. Firestone attended and, with Jo Freeman, formed a woman's caucus, which tried to present its own demands to the plenary session.[12] The women were told their resolution was not important enough for a floor discussion. They eventually managed to have their statement added to the end of the agenda, but it was not discussed. The director, Willam F. Pepper, refused to recognize any of the women waiting to speak and instead called on someone to speak about "the forgotten American, the American Indian". When five women, including Firestone, ran to the podium to protest, Pepper patted Firestone on the head and said, "Cool down, little girl; we have more important things to talk about than women's problems."[13][12]

Firestone and Freeman called a meeting of the women who had been at the “free school” course and the women’s workshop at the conference; this became the first Chicago women’s liberation group. It was known as the Westside group because it met weekly in Freeman’s apartment on Chicago’s west side. After a few months Freeman started a newsletter, Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement. It circulated nationwide (and in a few foreign countries), giving the new movement its name. Many of the women in the Westside group went on to start other feminist organizations, including the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.

Redstockings, New York Radical Feminists

When NYRW formed "consciousness raising groups", Firestone and Ellen Willis co-founded the radical feminist group Redstockings, named after the Blue Stockings Society, an 18th-century women's literary group.[9] Redstocking members included Kathie Sarachild ("Sisterhood is Powerful") and Carol Hanisch ("the personal is political"). Faludi writes that the Redstockings "fell apart" in 1970.[14] Firestone then co-founded New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) with Anne Koedt.[9]

Writing

Notes

With others from New York Radical Feminists, Firestone created and edited a feminist periodical, Notes, producing Notes from the First Year (June 1968), Notes from the Second Year (1970), and, with Anne Koedt as editor while Firestone was on leave, Notes from the Third Year (1971).[9][15]

The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) became a classic text of second-wave feminism. This was Firestone's first book and was published when she was just 25.[16] In the book, Firestone sought to develop a materialist view of history based on sex:[17] Also notable within the book is the ideal society Firestone creates, one void of the oppression of women.[18]

Just as to ensure 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. ... [T]he 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.[19]

Firestone synthesized the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Simone de Beauvoir into a radical feminist theory of politics.[20] She 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.

Firestone argued within her book that modern society could not achieve true gender equality until women's biological traits are separated from their gender identity.[5] Firestone argued Freud and Marx had ignored what she called the "sex class", the domination of women by men because of their biology. Gender inequality originates in the patriarchal societal structures imposed upon women because of their bodies, she argued, particularly the physical, social and psychological disadvantages caused by pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing.[9] To be human is to outgrow nature, she argued: "we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on the grounds of its origin in Nature." The abolition of the sex class requires that women take control of the means of reproduction.[21] She regarded pregnancy and childbirth as "barbaric" (a friend of hers compared labor to "shitting a pumpkin") and the nuclear family as a key source of women's oppression. Contraception, in vitro fertilization and other advances meant that sex would one day be separated from pregnancy and child-rearing, and women could be free. She anticipated that groups of people would in future gather together voluntarily to rear children without resorting to permanent male-female relationships and without the idea that particular children "belong" to one couple.[9]

Airless Spaces

By the time The Dialectic of Sex was published in 1970, Firestone had largely ceased to be politically active. She withdrew from politics in the early seventies, moved to Saint Marks Place, and worked as a painter. In the late eighties she became mentally ill.

In 1998 she published Airless Spaces, a collection of short stories based on her experiences being hospitalized for schizophrenia.[22][23]

Death and Legacy

On August 28, 2012, Firestone was found dead in her New York apartment by the building's owner. Alerted by neighbors, who had smelled an odor from her apartment, her superintendent peered in through a window from the fire escape and saw her body on the floor. Her landlord, Bob Perl, said she had probably been dead about a week.[24] According to her sister, Laya Firestone Seghi, she died of natural causes.[1] Her death was confirmed by the New York City Medical Examiner's Office; according to reports, she lived in a reclusive fashion and had been in ill health.[2][24] In a commemorative essay by Susan Faludi published several months after Firestone's death, The New Yorker magazine further detailed the circumstances of her demise, citing her decades-long struggle with schizophrenia—along with speculation of self-induced starvation—as probable contributing factors.[6] A memorial service was arranged in her memory.[25]

The Dialectic of Sex is still used in many women's studies programs. Its recommendations, such as raising children in a gender neutral fashion, mirror the ideals Firestone set out to achieve in her heyday. [26]

Works

Notes

  1. ↑ The camp was liberated by the British Army's 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, and handed over to the British Second Army and a Canadian unit.[7][8]
  2. ↑ The film also won the Experimental 1999 US Super 8; a Film & Video Fest-Screening Jury Citation 2000 New England Film & Video Festival; and Best Experimental Film Biennial 2002.[11]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Fox, Margalit (August 30, 2012). "Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67". The New York Times.
  2. 1 2 3 Butnick, Stephanie (August 30, 2012). "Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012)". Tablet Magazine.
  3. ↑ Benewick, Robert and Green, Philip (1998). "Shulamith Firestone 1945–". The Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Political thinkers. 2nd edition. Routledge, pp. 65–67.
  4. ↑ Anderson, Lincoln (August 30, 2012). "Shulamith Firestone, radical feminist, wrote best-seller, 67". The Villager.
  5. 1 2 Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 27. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2007. p129-131.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Faludi, Susan (April 15, 2013). "Death of a Revolutionary". The New Yorker.
  7. ↑ Reilly, Joanne (1998). Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp. London and New York: Routledge. p. 23.
  8. ↑ Hirsh, Michael (2010). The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust. New York: Random House Publishing Group. p. 107.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Ackelsberg, Martha (March 1, 2009). "Shulamith Firestone, 1945–2012". Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved June 24, 2010.
  10. ↑ Brody, Richard (April 10, 2015). "Recreating a Feminist Revolutionary". The New Yorker.
  11. 1 2 "Elisabeth Subrin Trilogy". Video Data bank. Archived from the original on 20 November 2008. Retrieved 24 June 2010.
  12. 1 2 Hall, Simon (6 June 2011). American Patriotism, American Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 61. ISBN 0-8122-0365-8.
  13. ↑ Freeman, Jo (1999). "On the Origins of Social Movements". In Freeman, Jo; Johnson, Victoria. Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. pp. (7–24), 19.
  14. ↑ Faludi, Susan (April 14, 2013). "A Note on the New York Radical Feminists". The New Yorker.
  15. ↑ Firestone, Shulamith (June 1968). ed. Notes from the First Year. New York: New York Radical Women, June 1968.
    Firestone, Shulamith (1970). ed. Notes from the Second Year. New York: New York Radical Women.
    Koedt, Anne; Firestone, Shulamith (1971). ed. Notes from the Third Year. New York: New York Radical Women.
  16. ↑ Fox, Margalit. "Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67".
  17. ↑ Firestone, Shulamith (1970). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company. p. 25.
  18. ↑ https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781317192763 (subscription required)
  19. ↑ Firestone 1970, p. 11.
  20. ↑ Rich, Jennifer (2014) [2007]. Modern Feminist Theory. Penrith: Humanities-Ebooks LLP, pp.  21ff. ISBN 978-1-84760-023-3
  21. ↑ Sydie, R. A. (1994). Natural women, cultured men: a feminist perspective on sociological theory, University of British Columbia Press, p. 144.
  22. ↑ Firestone, Shulamith (March 1, 1998). Airless Spaces. Semiotext(e). p. 457. ISBN 1-57027-082-1.
  23. ↑ Chesler, Phyllis (2018). A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women. St. Martin's Press. p. 190. ISBN 9781250094421.
  24. 1 2 Anderson, Lincoln (August 30, 2012). "Shulamith Firestone, radical feminist, wrote best-seller, 67". The Villager.
  25. ↑ "Death of a Revolutionary".
  26. ↑ Chertoff, Emily (31 August 2012). "Eulogy for a Sex Radical: Shulamith Firestone's Forgotten Feminism".


  • Quotations related to Shulamith Firestone at Wikiquote
  • Bindel, Julie (September 6, 2012). "Shulamith Firestone obituary". The Guardian.
  • Firestone, Shulamith (1997). "The Dialectic of Sex". In Nicholson, Linda. The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge. pp. 19–26. ISBN 9780415917612.
  • "Airless Spaces". The MIT Press. Archived from the original on 1 August 2010. Retrieved 24 June 2010.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.