The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

Shulamith Firestone was born in Canada to an orthodox Jewish family and was
educated at a yeshiva and at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a degree in
fine arts, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, dedicated to Simone
de Beauvoir, was published in 1970, when she was twenty-five years old. It was the
culmination of several whirl- wind years.
In 1967, Firestone was a founding member of the earliest women's liberation collective,
which became the Chicago West- side Group. Afterward, she moved to New York City;
there, she and others started the highly influential New York Radical Women,
Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists--each new group representing a shift in
ideology and tactics. About half of New York Radical Women's lively twenty-eight-page
mimeographed journal, Notes from the First Year ("$.50 to Women, $1.00 to Men"),
consisted of articles by Firestone. In 1968, she helped stage a mock burial of "traditional
woman- hood" at Arlington National Cemetery, conducted in the midst of a women's
anti-Vietnam War peace march, and she took part in the Miss America Pageant protest.
Firestone's book indicates that through all this furious activ- ity she had also thought
deeply about feminist theory. The i Dialectic of Sex was a powerful force in shaping the
ideas of radicals in the women's movement-Robin Morgan considered it "a basic
building block" of feminism that had been crucial to the development of her thinking.'

Firestone devoted a chapter each to feminist analysis of Marxism and Freudianism.

Regarding Marxism, she said that the biological division of the sexes for the purpose of
reproduc- tion lies at the origins of class. As to Freudianism, she suggested that power
relationships within the patriarchal nuclear family account for the Oedipus and Electra
complexes and penis envy: "In a family-based society, repressions due to the incest
taboo make a totally fulfilled sexuality impossible for anyone.'

The genesis of the family-which Firestone saw as the key institution of oppression of
both women and children—lay in the female's need for food and protection during
pregnancy and when nursing her young. However, Firestone foresaw a time when
women could be freed from the tyranny of their biology by technological advances, such
as extrauterine gestation. And further automation of work would make it easier for
women to be economically independent of men.
In the final chapter, portions of which are reprinted here, Firestone allowed herself to
engage in "utopian speculation" and envisioned "the ultimate revolution."

I. Structural Imperatives

NATURE PRODUCED THE FUNDAMENTAL INEQUALITY-half the human race must

bear and rear the children of all of them- which was later consolidated, institutionalized,
in the interests of men. Reproduction of the species cost women dearly, not only
emotionally, psychologically, culturally but even in strictly material (physical) terms:
before recent methods of contracep- tion, continuous childbirth led to constant "female
trouble," early aging, and death. Women were the slave class that main- tained the
species in order to free the other half for the business of the world-admittedly often its
drudge aspects, but certainly all its creative aspects as well.

This natural division of labor was continued only at great cultural sacrifice: men and
women developed only half of them- selves, at the expense of the other half. The
division of the psy- che into male and female to better reinforce the reproductive division
was tragic: the hypertrophy in men of rationalism, ag- gressive drive, the atrophy of their
emotional sensitivity was a physical (war) as well as a cultural disaster. The
emotionalism and passivity of women increased their suffering (we cannot speak of
them in a symmetrical way, since they were victimized as a class by the division).
Sexually men and women were chan- neled into a highly ordered-time, place,
procedure, even dia- logue-heterosexuality restricted to the genitals, rather than
diffused over the entire physical being.
I submit, then, that the first demand for any alternative sys- tem must be:

1. The freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means
available, and the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a
whole, men as well as women.

There are many degrees of this. Already we have a (hard-won) acceptance of "family
planning," if not contraception for its own sake. Proposals are imminent for day-care
centers, perhaps even twenty-four-hour child-care centers staffed by men as well as
women. But this, in my opinion, is timid if not entirely worthless as a transition. We're
talking about radical change. And though indeed it cannot come all at once, radical
goals must be kept in sight at all times. Day-care centers buy women ́ off. They ease
the immediate pressure without asking why that pressure is on women.
At the other extreme there are the more distant solutions based on the potentials of
modern embryology, that is, artificial reproduction, possibilities still so frightening that
they are sel- dom discussed seriously. . . . The fear is to some extent justified: in the
hands of our current society and under the direction of current scientists (few of whom
are female or even feminist), any attempted use of technology to "free" anybody is
suspect. But we are speculating about post-revolutionary systems, and for the purposes
of our discussion we shall assume flexibility and good intentions in those working out
the change.
To thus free women from their biology would be to threaten the social unit that is
organized around biological reproduction and the subjection of women to their biological
destiny, the fam- ily. Our second demand will come also as a basic contradiction to the
family, this time the family as an economic unit:

2. The full self-determination, including economic independence, of both women and

children.

To achieve this goal would require fundamental changes in our social and economic
structure. This is why we must talk about a feminist socialism: in the immediate future,
under capitalism, there could be at best a token integration of women into the labor
force. For women have been found exceedingly useful and cheap as a transient, often
highly skilled labor supply, not to mention the economic value of their traditional
function, the re- production and rearing of the next generation of children, a job for
which they are now patronized (literally and thus figura- tively) rather than paid. But
whether or not officially recognized, these are essential economic functions. Women, in
this present capacity, are the very foundation of the economic superstructure, vital to its
existence. The paeans to self-sacrificing motherhood have a basis in reality: Mom is
vital to the American way of life, considerably more than apple pie. She is an institution
without which the system really would fall apart. In official capitalist terms, the bill for her
economic services might run as high as one-fifth of the gross national product. But
payment is not the answer. To pay her, as is often discussed seriously in Sweden, is a
reform that does not challenge the basic division of labor and thus could never eradicate
the disastrous psychological and cul- tural consequences of that division of labor.
As for the economic independence of children, that is really a pipe dream, realized as
yet nowhere in the world. And, in the case of children too, we are talking about more
than a fair integration into the labor force; we are talking about the abolition of the labor
force itself under a cybernetic socialism, the radical re- structuring of the economy to
make "work,” i.e., wage labor, no longer relevant. In our post-revolutionary society
adults as well as children would be provided for independent of their social contributions
in the first equal distribution of wealth in history.
We have now attacked the family on a double front, challeng- ing that around which it is
organized: reproduction of the species by females and its outgrowth, the physical
dependence of women and children. To eliminate these would be enough to destroy the
family, which breeds the power psychology. How- ever, we will break it down still further.

3. The total integration of women and children into all aspects of the larger society.

All institutions that segregate the sexes, or bar children from adult society . . . must be
destroyed.
These three demands predicate a feminist revolution based on advanced technology.
And if the male/female and the adult/child cultural distinctions are destroyed, we will no
longer need the sexual repression that maintains these unequal classes, allowing for
the first time a "natural" sexual freedom. Thus we arrive at:

4. The freedom of all women and children to do whatever they wish to do sexually.

There will no longer be any reason not to. (Past reasons: Full sexuality threatened the
continuous reproduction necessary for human survival, and thus, through religion and
other cultural institutions, sexuality had to be restricted to reproductive pur- poses, all
nonreproductive sex pleasure considered deviation or worse. The sexual freedom of
women would call into question the fatherhood of the child, thus threatening patrimony.
Child sexuality had to be repressed because it was a threat to the pre- carious internal
balance of the family. These sexual repressions increased proportionately to the degree
of cultural exaggeration of the biological family.) In our new society, humanity could
finally revert to its natural "polymorphously perverse" sexual- ity-all forms of sexuality
would be allowed and indulged. . . .

II. Fears and Considerations

THESE BROAD IMPERATIVES must form the basis of any more spe- cific radical
feminist program. But our revolutionary demands are likely to meet anything from mild
balking (“utopian . . . un- realistic... farfetched... too far in the future... impos- sible...
well, it may stink, but you haven't got anything better...") to hysteria ("inhuman...
unnatural... sick... perverted... communistic . . . 1984... what? creative mother- hood
destroyed for babies in glass tubes, monsters made by sci- entists? etc."). But... such
negative reactions paradoxically may signify how close we are hitting: revolutionary
feminism is the only radical program that immediately cracks through to the emotional
strata underlying "serious" politics, thus reintegrat- ing the personal with the public, the
subjective with the objective, the emotional with the rational-the female principle with the
male.
What are some of the prime components of this resistance that is keeping people from
experimenting with alternatives to the family, and where does it come from? We are all
familiar with the details of Brave New World: cold collectives, with indi- vidualism
abolished, sex reduced to a mechanical act, children become robots, Big Brother
intruding into every aspect of pri- vate life, rows of babies fed by impersonal machines,
eugenics manipulated by the state, genocide of cripples and retards for the sake of a
super-race created by white-coated technicians, all emotion considered weakness, love
destroyed, and so on. The family (which, despite its oppressiveness, is now the last
refuge from the encroaching power of the state, a shelter that provides the little
emotional warmth, privacy, and individual comfort now available) would be destroyed,
letting this horror penetrate indoors.
Paradoxically, one reason The 1984 Nightmare occurs so frequently is that it grows
directly out of, signifying an exaggeration of the evils of our present male-supremacist
culture. . . . The Nightmare is directly the product of the attempt to imagine a society in
which women have become like men, crippled in the identical way, thus destroying a
delicate balance of interlocking dependencies.
However, we are suggesting the opposite: Rather than con- centrating the female
principle into a "private" retreat, into which men periodically duck for relief, we want to
rediffuse it- for the first time creating society from the bottom up. Man's difficult triumph
over Nature has made it possible to restore the truly natural: he could undo Adam's and
Eve's curse both, to reestablish the earthly Garden of Eden. But in his long toil his
imagination has been stifled: he fears an enlargement of his drudgery, through the
incorporation of Eve's curse into his own.
But there is a more concrete reason why this subliminal horror image operates to
destroy serious consideration of feminism: the failure of past social experiments.
Radical experiments, when they have solved problems at all, have created an entirely
new-and not necessarily improved-set of problems in their place....2
Because their ideology was not founded on the minimal femi- nist premises above,
these experiments never achieved even the more limited democratic goals their (male)
theorists and leaders had predicted. However, their success within narrow spheres
shows that the biological family unit is amenable to change. But we would have to totally
control its institutions to eliminate the oppression altogether.
However to be fair-it is only recently, in the most ad- vanced industrial countries, that
genuine preconditions for femi- nist revolution have begun to exist. For the first, time it is
becoming possible to attack the family not only on moral grounds--in that it reinforces
biologically-based sex class, promoting adult males, who are then divided further
among themselves by race and class privilege, over females of all ages and male
children-but also on functional grounds: it is no longer necessary or most effective as
the basic social unit of reproduc- tion and production. There is no longer a need for
universal re- production, even if the development of artificial reproduction does not soon
place biological reproduction itself in question; cybernation, by changing not only man's
relation to work, but his need to work altogether, will eventually strip the division of labor
at the root of the family of any remaining practical value.

III. The Slow Death of the Family

THE INCREASING EROSION of the functions of the family by mod- ern technology
should, by now, have caused some signs of its weakening. However, this is not
absolutely the case. Though the institution is archaic, artificial cultural reinforcements
have been imported to bolster it: Sentimental sermons, manuals of guid- ance, daily
columns in newspapers and magazines, special courses, services, and institutions for
(professional) couples, parents, and child educators, nostalgia, warnings to individuals
who question or evade it, and finally, if the number of dropouts becomes a serious
threat, a real backlash, including outright persecution of nonconformists. The last has
not happened only because it is not yet necessary.
Marriage is in the same state as the Church: Both are becom- ing functionally defunct,
as their preachers go about heralding a revival, eagerly chalking up converts in a day of
dread. And just as God has been pronounced dead quite often but has this sneaky way
of resurrecting himself, so everyone debunks marriage, yet ends up married.3
What is keeping marriage so alive? [One] of the cultural bul- warks of marriage in the
twentieth century, the romantic tradition of nonmarital love, the hetaerism that was the
necessary adjunct to monogamous marriage, has been purposely confused with that
most pragmatic of institutions, making it more appealing-thus restraining people from
experimenting with other social forms that could satisfy their emotional needs as well or
better.
Under increasing pressure, with the pragmatic bases of the marriage institution blurred,
sex roles relaxed to a degree that would have disgraced a Victorian. He had no crippling
doubts about his role, nor about the function and value of marriage. To him it was simply
an economic arrangement of some selfish ben- efit, one that would most easily satisfy
his physical needs and re- produce his heirs. His wife, too, was clear about her duties
and rewards: ownership of herself and of her full sexual, psychological, and
housekeeping services for a lifetime, in return for long- term patronage and protection
by a member of the ruling class, and-in her turn-limited control over a household and
over her children until they reached a certain age. Today this contract based on divided
roles has been so disguised by sentiment that it goes completely unrecognized by
millions of newlyweds, and even most older married couples.

But this blurring of the economic contract, and the resulting confusion of sex roles, has
not significantly eased women's oppression. In many cases it has put her in only a more
vulnerable position. With the clear-cut arrangement of matches by parents all but
abolished, a woman, still part of an underclass, must now, in order to gain the
indispensable male patronage and pro- tection, play a desperate game, hunting down
bored males while yet appearing cool. And even once she is married, any overlap of
roles generally takes place on the wife's side, not on the hus- band's: the "cherish and
protect" clause is the first thing forgot- ten-while the wife has gained the privilege of
going to work to "help out," even of putting her husband through school. More than ever
she shoulders the brunt of the marriage, not only emo- tionally, but now also in its more
practical aspects. She has sim- ply added his job to hers.
A second cultural prop to the outmoded institution is the privatization of the marriage
experience: each partner enters marriage convinced that what happened to his parents,
what happened to his friends can never happen to him. Though Wrecked Marriage has
become a national hobby, a universal ob- session as witnessed by the booming
business of guidebooks to marriage and divorce, the women's magazine industry, an
afflu- ent class of marriage counselors and shrinks, whole repertoires of Ball-and-Chain
jokes and gimmicks, and cultural products such as soap opera, the marriage-and-family
genre on TV, e.g., I Love Lucy or Father Knows Best, films and plays like Cas- savetes'
Faces and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?— still one encounters everywhere a
defiant "We're different" brand of optimism in which the one good (outwardly exem-
plary, anyway) marriage in the community is habitually cited to prove
that it is possible.

The privatization process is typified by comments like, "Well, I know I'd make a great
mother." It is useless to point out that everyone says that, that the very parents or
friends now dis- missed as "bad" parents and "poor" marital partners all began marriage
and parenthood in exactly the same spirit. After all, does anyone choose to have a
"bad" marriage? Does anyone choose to be a "bad" mother? And even if it were a
question of “good” vs. “bad” marital partners or parents, there will always be as many of
the latter as the former; under the present system of universal marriage and parenthood
just as many spouses and children must pull a bad lot as a good one; in fact any
classes of "good" and "bad" are bound to re-create themselves in identi- cal proportion.
Thus the privatization process functions to keep people blaming themselves, rather than
the institution, for its failure: Though the institution consistently proves itself unsatis-
factory, even rotten, it encourages them to believe that somehow their own case will be
different.

Warnings can have no effect, because logic has nothing to do with why people get
married. Everyone has eyes of his own, par- ents of his own. If he chooses to block all
evidence, it is because he must. In a world out of control, the only institutions that grant
him an illusion of control, that seem to offer any safety, shelter, or warmth, are the
"private" institutions: religion, marriage/family, and, most recently, psychoanalytic
therapy. But, as we have seen, the family is neither private nor a refuge, but is di- rectly
connected to-is even the cause of the ills of the larger society which the individual is no
longer able to confront.
But the cultural bulwarks we have just discussed-the confu- sion of romance with
marriage, the blurring of its economic functions and its rigid sex roles, the privatization
process, the illusion of control and refuge, all of which exploit the fears of the modern
person living within an increasingly hostile environ- ment-still are not the whole answer
to why the institution of marriage continues to thrive. It is unlikely that such negatives
alone could support the family unit as a vital institution. It would be too easy to attribute
the continuation of the family structure solely to backlash. We will find, I am afraid, in
review- ing marriage in terms of our four minimal feminist demands, that it fulfills (in its
own miserable way) at least a portion of the requirements at least as well as or better
than did most of the social experiments we have discussed.
1. Freedom of women from the tyranny of reproduction and childrearing is hardly
fulfilled. However, women are often relieved of its worst strains by a servant class—and
in the modern marriage, by modern gynecology, "family planning," and the in- creasing
takeover, by the school, day-care centers, and the like, of the childrearing functions.
2. Though financial independence of women and children is not generally granted, there
is a substitute: physical security.
3. Women and children, segregated from the larger society, are integrated within the
family unit, the only place where this occurs. That the little interplay between men,
women, and chil- dren is concentrated in one social unit makes that unit all the more
difficult to renounce.
4. Though the family is the source of sexual repression, it guarantees the conjugal
couple a steady, if not satisfactory, sex supply, and provides the others with
"aim-inhibited" relation- ships, which are, in many cases, the only long-term
relationships these individuals will ever have.
Thus there are practical assets of marriage to which people cling. It is not all a cultural
sales job. On a scale of percentages, marriage—at least in its desperate liberalized
version-would fare us well as most of the experimental alternatives thus far tried,
which... also fulfilled some of the stipulations and not others, or only partially fulfilled all
of them. And marriage has the added advantage of being a known quantity.
And yet marriage in its very definition will never be able to fulfill the needs of its
participants, for it was organized around, and reinforces, a fundamentally oppressive
biological condition that we only now have the skill to correct. As long as we have the
institution we shall have the oppressive conditions at its base. We need to start talking
about new alternatives that will satisfy the emotional and psychological needs that
marriage, archaic as it is, still satisfies, but that will satisfy them better.