In 1951, W. H. Auden awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award to a Radcliffe College senior named Adrienne Rich. Three years later, Rich married a Harvard economist named Alfred Haskell Conrad. Near the start of Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience, Rich would reflect on those early years: “I have a very clear, keen memory of myself the day after I was married: I was sweeping a floor. Probably the floor did not really need to be swept; probably I simply did not know what else to do with myself . . . I felt I was bending to some ancient form, too ancient to question. This is what women have always done.”

In the seventies, the question of “what women do” was more in flux than at nearly any time before or since. Thinkers like Rich and Shulamith Firestone, both of whom died in the past year, were part of a vibrant and far-reaching intellectual reimagining of social life. Having been politicized through the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, they were both deeply engaged with the economic arguments of the Left, insisting on a place in public life even as they critiqued its core institutions. It was one of the rare moments in which intellectual work and practical politics not only reinforced each other, but became nearly indistinguishable. In texts like Of Woman Born and Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, women thinkers built on their understanding of the relationship between biology and the oppressive division of the sexes. They asked how we had organized ourselves in social and economic relations, what the consequences of these organizations were, and how it might be done differently. The result was not a laundry list of “issues” to be dealt with, but an analysis of a system that deforms everything from work and family to art and science. It’s an analysis that continues to resonate, even as public discourse declares on the one hand that feminism’s goals have been accomplished, and on the other that they were always impossible.

Firestone’s work stands out among that of other radical feminists during that period. She resisted the common notion that sexism is an easily fixable glitch in an otherwise just and functioning society, noting that conventional wisdom instinctively understands this. When anti-feminists say, “This is how relations between the sexes have always been,” she argues, they are speaking a truth about the depth of the problem. Near the start of The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone dismisses the search for egalitarian models in long-lost matriarchal pasts or indigenous cultures as “anthropological sophistries.” The nuclear family may be a recent construction, she notes, but a biological, patriarchal family is not. But, she asks, so what? We accept many things into our world that have not been there before; we need not accept oppression because of its long history any more than we accept disease. “The ‘natural’ is not necessarily a ‘human’ value.” And yet the biological structures persist. “The problem becomes political, demanding more than a comprehensive historical analysis, when one realizes that, though man is increasingly capable of freeing himself from the biological conditions that created his tyranny over women and children, he has little reason to want to give this tyranny up,” she writes.