Shulamith Firestone - Biography

Shulamith Firestone (born January 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.

Life

Firestone was born in Ottawa, Canada, and raised in an orthodox Jewish family, in Saint Louis, Missouri. She is the older sister of Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. She attended Yavneh of Telshe Yeshivah, near Cleveland, soon switching to Washington University in St. Louis and the School of 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. The film was rediscovered in the 1990s by experimental filmmaker, Elisabeth Subrin, who did a frame-for-frame reshoot of the original documentary, with Kim Soss playing Firestone. It was released in 1997 as Shulie, winning the 1998 Los Angeles Film Critics Association award, Experimental 1999 US Super 8, a Film & Video Fest-Screening Jury Citation 2000 New England Film & Video Festival and Best Experimental Film Biennial 2002.

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 and co-founded New York Radical Women, during which time she wrote three essays: "Women and the Radical Movement", "The Jeanette Rankin Brigade: Woman Power"?, and "The Women's Rights Movement in the U.S.A.: New View" When NYRW dissolved, Firestone and Ellen Willis co-founded the radical feminist group Redstockings, named after the Blue Stockings Society, a women's literary group founded by Elizabeth Montagu in the mid 18th century. Firestone left Redstockings to co-found New York Radical Feminists... In late 1968 she edited Notes from the First Year, followed by Notes from the Second Year (1970), and Notes from the Third Year (1971). By the time The Dialectic of Sex was published in 1970, she had largely ceased to be politically active. Firestone 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 a haunting account of life, in and out of psychiatric hospitals, titled Airless Spaces.

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. 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. 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.

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.

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External links

• 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).