Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone (/ʃuːˈlɑːmɪθ/; January 7, 1945 – August 28, 2012) (also called Shulie, or Shuloma) was a 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 and career

Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein was the second of six children of Orthodox Jewish parents born in Ottawa and raised in Kansas City and St. Louis. Her family Americanized its surname to Firestone when Shulamith was a child. She pronounced her first name shoo-LAH-mith but was familiarly known as Shuley or Shulie. She attended Yavneh of Rabbinical College of Telshe, near Cleveland, and Washington University in St. Louis before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a BFA degree 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.