Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone

Some feminists actually do have good hair, who knew?

Born in Ottawa as Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein, she grew up in Kansas City and St. Louis. She was raised in a highly religious background, and later got a degree in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Then she went to New York City and got heavily into radical feminist activism. In 1970, she wrote The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (full text here), basically wrapping feminism and Marxism into an ideological burrito. Like I’ve been telling you, Second Wave feminism was inspired by Communism. These days, the cultural Marxism burrito has gotten a lot bigger with the “intersectionality” business, but all that’s another story.
Naturally, she described traditional family life as oppression. This is despite the fact that a husband and wife are a team supporting each other, and by far the best environment for raising children.
Later, she retired from politics and took up painting again. Her mental health declined, and her second and final book described repeated hospitalizations for paranoid schizophrenia. In 2012, her decomposing body was found in her New York apartment, possibly dead from starvation. Although she was beholden to two noxious ideologies, still I can’t help but feel a twinge of sorrow at this sad fate.
As a glowing tribute put it:

Firestone… did not have sex. In fact, she was a political celibate. She encouraged other women to become celibate. Some of them did.
[…] Firestone wanted to eliminate the following things: sex roles, procreative sex, gender, childhood, monogamy, mothering, the family unit, capitalism, the government, and especially the physiological phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth. She wanted to mechanize reproduction—gestating fetuses in artificial wombs—and raise the offspring communally, treating them no differently from adults at the earliest possible age.
[…] When parents choose to raise their children gender-neutral, a lot of that’s Firestone. When we hail advances in artificial reproduction, we’re seeing developments that Firestone championed decades ago. When writers theorize about the end of men, they’re tearing whole pages out of Firestone’s book.
[…] Firestone was a radical biological materialist, but in her fervor she at times resembled a martyr or a saint.

Did her oncoming problems influence her ideology? If so, she couldn’t help it, but one need not take people with screws loose very seriously.
Kooky quotes:

Natural reproduction is neither in women’s best interests nor in those of the children so reproduced. The joy of giving birth—invoked so frequently in this society—is a patriarchal myth. In fact, pregnancy is barbaric, and natural childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable and at worst it is like shitting a pumpkin.

Was that considerable hyperbole, or some misconceptions about basic anatomy? Your call.

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.

What is it with feminists being upset about humans being a sexually dimorphic species? There’s no sense in getting mad about things you can’t control, like basic biology.

It is only the failure of my plots I fear.

I take the opposite view. Anyway, she was a nut, but at least she didn’t shoot anyone…