Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

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Introduction: In Defense of Science Fiction

How can men be mothers! How can some kid who isn’t related to you be your child? … How could anyone know what being a mother means who has never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart, who has never borne a baby in blood and pain, who has never suckled a child.

(Marge Piercy¹)

An inhabitant of 1970s New York, Connie Ramos has been telepathically transported to a future society in which pregnancy and childbirth have been eliminated. Children are grown from embryos in artificial wombs and are raised by multiple ‘mothers’ not genetically related to them, and who may be either men or women. Connie has responded with curiosity but by no means hostility to many aspects of this brave new world, but as the door of the ‘brooder’ tank slides back, revealing ‘seven human babies joggling slowly upside down, each in a sac of its own inside a larger fluid receptacle,’ her mouth gapes and her stomach turns.² That biological motherhood itself could be expropriated from women fills her with revulsion.

Yet this is no dystopian vision, but a utopian one. And despite Connie’s fears about male encroachment upon the unique capacity of women, it is a feminist one. It is drawn from Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time, which imaginatively creates the future society sketched out in Shulamith Firestone’s feminist manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.

Firestone’s book burst onto the emerging feminist scene in 1970 and proved immediately controversial. Its main thesis is that the origin of women’s oppression lies in biology itself. For Firestone, it is precisely the fact that it is women and not men who gestate a child, give birth in blood and pain, and shape their lives around another dependent human being that gives rise to male domination. This biological difference, she argues, divides humanity into two classes that are not equal, and this fundamental inequality then reproduces itself remorselessly at all levels of society. If Firestone’s analysis was stark, then her solution was revolutionary: since it is biology that is the problem, then biology must be changed, through a technological intervention that would begin with contraception and abortion but would end in the option of completely removing the reproductive process from women’s bodies. The Dialectic of Sex proposes a post-revolutionary world in which human society has been transformed in order to deliver women, children and ultimately also men from the tyranny of an oppression that is rooted in biology. The nuclear family will have been disbanded. Human beings will live together in ‘households’ of seven to ten adults. Children need not be genetically related to any of these parents but will be raised by all, and will enjoy unprecedented freedoms. Machines will have rendered alienated labor obsolete, freeing people to pursue activities of their own choosing. Sexual difference itself will have been eliminated.

The radical feminism of Shulamith Firestone

This book argues for a return to Firestone. Today, nearly half a century after the Dialectic’s first publication, a resurgent feminism is again addressing the questions that Firestone raised. These are questions about the impact upon women of their role in procreation. But they are also questions about the arrangements in which we all cohabit, work, love and have sex. Who can be a mother? What does the nuclear family mean, for those both within and without one? What might be the effects of cybernetics on employment? What effects do ideas of romance and the erotic have upon our lives?

It is not surprising then, that recent years have witnessed calls to go back to Firestone’s book. Nina Power and Laurie Penny, for example, have both urged today’s feminists to turn to the ‘deplorably overlooked’ and ‘criminally neglected’ Firestone.³ In 2010, Mandy Merck and Stella Sanford published an invaluable collection of academic essays on Firestone, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex.⁴ With the republication of The Dialectic of Sex by Verso in 2015, Firestone’s text is now easily accessible to a new generation of readers.

To return to Firestone is, however, to reclaim a book that fellow feminist Ann Snitow has characterized as a ‘demon text’ of second wave feminism. The Dialectic of Sex has been constantly apologized for as exemplary of 1970s feminism’s worst excesses and failings.⁵ Subsequent feminists have criticized the book for biologism: for attributing to biology phenomena that it is thought are better understood as social or cultural in origins. It has been taken to task for technological determinism: for naively championing technological advance. Its assumption of the ubiquity of patriarchy has been called dehistoricizing. And critics have objected to what is taken to be Firestone’s abjection of the pregnant female body: her construction of that body as an object of fear or repulsion. These and other criticisms will be considered in what follows.

And of course, there really is something difficult to swallow about its thesis. Something like Connie’s affronted repudiation is to be heard whenever it is raised. Indeed, in the very first page of the Dialectic, Firestone anticipates ‘the reaction of the common man, woman, and child – That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!’ (3). For while there is much in the book that speaks the same language as twenty-first-century feminism, her radical proposals seem to have departed the field of rational debate. An end to the nuclear family? The abolition of wage labor? The creation of artificial wombs? Firestone’s manifesto can seem both preposterous and hopelessly outdated: a far-fetched, utopian hangover from a Swinging Sixties radicalism that has been definitively surpassed by the realism of subsequent decades. Firestone’s revolutionary future can seem so fantastical that her book reads like science fiction.

What I am arguing for is therefore a critical return to Firestone. The flaws and the difficulties of the book are real. Some of the problems are to do with the peculiar history of the book and its author. Firestone was just 25 years of age when the Dialectic was published. She had become ‘one of the most important architects’⁶ of the radical feminist movement in northern America and the book was written ‘in fervor, in a matter of months,’⁷ while Firestone continued her grassroots organizing and activism. Upon publication it sold well, and was widely reviewed and discussed in journalism and on TV, where it was both ‘lauded and excoriated.’⁸ And yet it was never really ‘taken up by grassroots radical feminism’⁹ – probably as a result of its disagreements with much radical feminist thought, as we shall explore. Firestone disappeared from feminist politics and writing in the same year that the book came out, to concentrate on working as an artist. From then until her death in 2012, she seemed to eschew being identified with her earlier activism and writing (she was one of very few of the founding women’s libbers, for example, who refused to be interviewed for Alice Echols’s illuminating study of early US feminism¹⁰). One consequence of Firestone’s withdrawal was that the Dialectic was thus in a sense orphaned, cast out upon the world to fend for itself without the guardianship of an author who would defend it against misunderstandings, correct or revise its arguments as feminist theory evolved over the years.

And of course, feminist theory has evolved, and in ways that reveal that the Dialectic has some major failings. For example, one of the achievements of black, lesbian and working class feminists has been to expose the ways that much second wave theorizing proceeded from assumptions based upon white, straight and middle class experience. The Dialectic all too frequently assumes that ‘woman’ is a unitary category, and in so doing installs just that white, straight, middle class experience as the norm. We will explore some of the problems this produces, in relation to Firestone’s discussion of the family, and her deeply flawed and rightly criticized discussion of racism. But returning to her text might also cause us to ask about people whom she does not consider at all. For Firestone, a woman is someone with a womb. What then of trans women? Or of the pregnancies of trans men? Sometimes Firestone’s text must be wrestled with – even read against the grain of her own intentions – in order that its insights be developed beyond the frame of the original analysis.

It is precisely the facilitation of this kind of critical engagement with the Dialectic that this book aims at producing. In so doing, I hope to help rescue what Mary O’Brien astutely calls this ‘unevenly luminous’ book¹¹ from its undeserved dismissal as the mad one about artificial wombs. This attempt at rescue is inevitably partial. My focus is on Firestone’s core thesis about reproduction, and this focus means that there are other aspects of her text – such as her discussions of romance and love, beauty and eroticism – that I have not been able thoroughly to address. I do hope, however, that readers will walk away feeling encouraged to also give these aspects of Firestone’s work the critical attention they deserve.

Chapters 2 to 8 aim to return readers to the text itself, to what exactly is, and is not, being argued there. Doing so will require setting the thesis within the context of the urgent debates taking place within the radical political movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. And it will involve establishing the nature of Firestone’s own critical engagements with a wide set of theorists that includes Marx, Engels, Beauvoir, and Freud. The aim of these chapters is primarily to present and to problematize Firestone’s arguments, and to ask about the relationships between their different elements. I propose, for example, that as a methodological principle, Firestone’s causal account of women’s subordination be distinguished from her proposals for its solution. It is possible to hold that Firestone is right in the former, but wrong in the latter. But readers will see that I also want to offer a qualified defense of Firestone’s thesis. In Chapters 9 to 10, I shall turn to what seem to me some of the most urgent issues of reproductive freedom facing us today, to offer a Firestonian account of how these might be thought about, and what might need to be done.

In defense of science fiction

This book, therefore, will offer a defense of science fiction, and especially of its utopian variant. When Firestone called explicitly for utopian science fiction and then sketched one herself in her (in)famous final chapter, she did so while understanding that utopianism can be dangerous. But she did so, nonetheless, since she understood as well the opposing but greater dangers of not believing that something better is possible at all. Utopian visions don’t have to be about projecting a society deemed to be perfect, and still less about doing so with finality. But they matter – erhaps even are crucially needed – because they disrupt one of the key functions of ideology: that of making the status quo seem that it could not be otherwise.¹² Firestone’s work, as good science fiction, speculates about the possible direction of a future society in order to show that our present one both could and should be better than it is.

Fundamentally, I shall argue that despite its blind spots and flaws Firestone’s book is invaluable for feminist politics today. In a situation in which, as Nancy Fraser and others have observed, feminist discourse is so frequently appropriated into a neoliberal framework,¹³ the Dialectic’s affront to common sense is precisely what is needed. Recoverable from among those second wave ideas that the march of hegemonic values has left behind are radical impulses capable of being reformulated in order to energize a genuinely oppositional feminism – one that cannot easily be co-opted into strategies for selling makeup, lingerie, sex toys and pole dancing lessons, or for justifying the waging of wars abroad.

The twenty-first century remains in thrall to ideologies of maternity and the nuclear family. We face a growing right-wing populism that continues to treat pregnant women as baby-vessels and to stigmatize non-reproductive lifestyles, even as the economic policies of neoliberalism make starting and supporting a family more difficult than ever for the majority of people. For anyone interested in the political significance of abortion, contraception, IVF, egg-freezing, surrogacy, changes to the nuclear family and to the nature of work today, there are few starting points as sharp, funny, rude, brave, clear-sighted and unapologetic as the work of Shulamith Firestone.

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Rebellious Daughters of Chicago and New York

Cool down little girl, we have more important things to do here than talk about women’s problems.

(William Pepper)

These words, attributed to William Pepper at the National Conference for New Politics in 1967 (formed to unite leftist political organizations behind an anti-Vietnam presidential ticket), were delivered to the 22-year-old Shulamith Firestone as she and other women activists attempted to take the stage to propose a resolution on women’s issues.¹⁴ The resolution would have called for access to contraception and abortion; equal pay; the reform of marriage, divorce and property laws; and against the sexualization of women in the media. Pepper reputedly underscored his advice to Firestone with a kindly pat on the head.

Firestone was at this time living in Chicago, where she was forming connections with other politicized women. She was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1945, to a German Jewish mother who had fled Nazi persecution, and to a father from an assimilated Jewish family, who had, however, embraced Orthodox Judaism in his youth. She was raised in the American Midwest and attended university in St Louis, Missouri, before moving to Chicago to study drawing and painting at its Art Institute. While there, she became the subject of a documentary on the ‘Now Generation’ by four male student filmmakers, in which she undergoes a ‘brutal critique’ of her work by her male lecturers. In her interview she declares her belief that ‘any intellectual or artistic woman is going to have problems with men.’¹⁵

The counter culture, radical politics and