Shulamith Firestone’s Postmortem for Radical Feminism
Shulamith Firestone’s writing captured the utopian spirit of radical feminism. In her last published book, Airless Spaces, she took stock of that movement’s failures amid the crisis of care unleashed by the destruction of the welfare state.
Still from Shulie: Shulamith Firestone, 1967. (SAIC)
Throughout the second half of the 1990s, a wave of articles published in the mainstream US media declared, with jolting regularity, the end of feminism. By then, the movement had grown used to obituaries. A June 1998 Time cover featured the black-and-white disembodied heads of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem alongside the fictional character Ally McBeal, the lone colorized figure. Beneath her in bold red type the question: “Is feminism dead?”
Attempts to reinvigorate the movement were not treated favorably. “After a while,” a 1998 New York Times review of Phyllis Chesler’s Letters to a Young Feminist opens, “all of these books that aim to jump-start the feminist movement get a little depressing. Not because they don’t contain worthwhile information or advice, but because young women these days, as often as not, believe that they need feminism like fish need bicycles.”
For her part, Chesler wrote in a 2006 article that “feminists have failed their own ideals.” She took consolation, however, in the fact that the movement’s ideals had found a new use, mobilizing support for the “liberation” of women in Islamic parts of the world as an adjunct to imperialist wars in the Middle East.
Obituaries for feminism in the late 1990s and the early 2000s were clearly signs that the energy that had animated the movement in the 1960s and ’70s — and the so-called “third wave” that followed it — had petered out. Like every feminist upsurge before it — in the 1790s, 1840s, and 1900s — the women’s movement of the late 1960s and ’70s was part of a wider constellation of political struggles that contributed to its emergence and shaped its demands. It initiated discussions among women of all classes and backgrounds about the nuclear family, romantic love and sexuality, even as class and race divisions emerged within those movements.
In the United States, the 1970s would see a succession of significant and tangible legislative and social gains that included the 1972 and 1973 Supreme Court rulings to legalize contraception and abortion, and equal-opportunity measures applied to pregnancy in the workplace. These gains were made possible by a shift in mood: in August 1970, Alice Neel’s portrait of Kate Millett was put on the cover of Time magazine, and Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex were published in mass market paperbacks. The former sold 80,000 copies in its first year and the latter became a cult classic among young women.
This shift was not confined to readers who were already part of leftist and feminist movements. Editors and writers at women’s magazines and women who worked in publishing actively sought to produce feminist content. Women’s magazines, which Friedan had critiqued the previous decade for producing a “feminine mystique,” included many radical feminist ideas about sex and romance and women’s work alongside more traditional articles on beauty and marriage.
This new atmosphere sought to create a liberal, relatable feminism. But it was spurred on by the radical agenda that Millett and Firestone had been instrumental in building, both in their publications and in radical feminist circles in New York. Millett received far more media attention — in part because her work appealed more to the mainstream and in part because of the media focus on her bisexuality — than Firestone.
But “Shulie,” as Firestone was known to her friends, was a formidable presence. A founder of the first radical feminist organization in the city and coeditor of the first theoretical journal of the women’s liberation movement, Firestone was audacious and outspoken, and at just over five foot tall, roughly the same height as Rosa Luxemburg. As Firestone wrote in an editorial for Notes From the Second Year, the intention was not only to “dare to be bad” but to risk failure in the endeavor. The journal, which Firestone saw as essential for creating a historical document of the movement, was where such ideas as Carol Hanisch’s “the personal is the political” would first be published.
In her brilliant, uncompromising, and flawed The Dialectic of Sex, written when she was just twenty-five, Firestone sets out a utopian vision for feminism. In the manifesto, drawing on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and working in the tradition of Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, she described the biological family as the locus of women’s oppression. “Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization,” she writes, “the biological family — the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be struggled — the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.”
Firestone — who was part of left organizations in Chicago where she was an art student before she moved to New York — took it for granted that class and work would need to be transformed to bring about a socialist future. But she also wanted her readers to rethink the culture around sex and romance, which she thought was essential to understanding how power operates and how women accept states of alienation.
In Firestone’s vision, by giving women control of the means of reproduction and by demystifying the compelling force of monogamous love, women would be liberated from their family roles and a new vision of collective childcare and romance would emerge. “Women and love are underpinnings,” she writes. “Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.”
Firestone didn’t underestimate the challenges of this examination, nor the backlash it would face, nor the work and time it would take. “This is painful,” she writes, “no matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is only to be expected that “many women give up in despair.”
Many of these ideas had their origins in Soviet theories of the family and sexuality. They trickled down into the mainstream and came to inform liberal demands for changes to domestic gender roles and workplace legislation, which focused, for the most part, on antidiscrimination agendas. This legalist framework was supported by the Washington-based “women’s lobby,” philanthropic institutional bodies, most notably the Ford Foundation, and the rapid emergence of women’s studies departments across the United States.
For members of the generation of women shaped by radical feminism, this victory was a Pyrrhic one that signaled a retreat from the movement’s utopian aspirations. The institutionalization of the US women’s movement was a gradual yet compounding affair. It led to a state where feminism was at once everywhere — like pollen in a summer haze — and nowhere, with any radical force.
Liberal feminist organizations, like NOW, Firestone writes, “concentrate on the more superficial symptoms of sexism — legal inequities, employment discrimination, and the like.” The emphasis was similar in spirit, she notes, to the suffragist movement “with its stress on equality with men.” Radical feminists aimed, instead, for liberation from sex roles and the total transformation of private life and the public sphere.
After the demise of radical organizations, and disillusioned with the bitter infighting within the movement, Firestone withdrew from feminist politics and public life altogether. Struggling with schizophrenia, she spent years in and out of psychiatric institutions and was dependent on public assistance. When her body was found in 2012 in her studio apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement walk-up in the East Village, she had been dead for several days.
Suffocating Places
Firestone was also an artist, and in a 1967 documentary Shulie, she articulates how the ethics of representation is continuous with her thinking about collective politics. The book that was meant to be her next project after The Dialectic of Sex — an account of women’s art — never emerged. Instead, her second book, Airless Spaces, which was published twenty-eight years after her first, is a collection of short stories — a sort of collective postmortem of an era of radicalism.
The book, which has been reissued by Semiotexte, collects vignettes of institutional life that are, by turn, darkly humorous, mercilessly clinical, deadpan, and relentlessly claustrophobic — they demand that we pay attention to the people and spaces that escape even the most humanistic and attentive gazes.
Airless Places is not overtly about the rise and fall of radical feminism in the United States and the three decades between the writing of The Dialectic and this book. But its inventory of claustration, institutionalization, and abandonment, set against the backdrop of the failure of the utopian movements of the 1970s, tells its own story about the feminists that “time forgot.”
Although the narrator of Airless Places is not identified as Firestone, she shares many of the same events and experiences of her life: feeling deeply betrayed by experiences in the women’s movements, grief at her brother’s suicide, lame male lovers, psychiatric institutionalization, and chronic loneliness that ensues from accumulative states of precarity and disillusionment.
Unlike Millett’s autobiographical account of the schisms in the movement and their effect on her mental health in Flying (1974), these stories, narrated at a remove, present the narrator’s life as merely characteristic of those who bear wounds that won’t heal — because the available means of treating those wounds (pharmaceutical medicalization or individualized models of anaesthetizing self-care) fail to offer the political solutions and the critique of power, individual and systemic, that might make these people feel that the future is worth investing in.
In the first section, “Hospital,” we encounter “Queenie,” who “reigned from a corner” of a communal booth on a psychiatric ward, and “Debra Daugherty, “an obviously once-beautiful chick” who “now looked like a wasted Appalachian from a Dorothea Lange photography show of the thirties.” At the end of the story the narrator meets Debra for a New Year’s Eve drink but by the time she arrives, Debra is already wasted. The narrator briefly considers whether she should feel guilty for abandoning Debra in her precarious state. But her only concern is whether she might have caught her stomach bug and wonders if she will make it home in time to catch the ball fall in Times Square on TV.
In every story in “Hospital,” regardless of the subject’s personal circumstances, or whether they are released, they are left with only the faint remnants of the life they once had. “Every time she went in,” the narrator reports of Rachel — about whom, like every other character in the fifty stories, we learn next to nothing — “especially after the first, she felt submerged, as if someone were holding her under water for months. When she came out, she was fat, helpless, unable to make the smallest decision, speechless, and thoroughly programmed by the rigid hospital routine.”
Airless Spaces brings to light a problem at the heart of Firestone’s first book, The Dialectic of Sex. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists advanced critiques of orthodox forms of psychiatric care, which they believed pathologized the expression of women’s dissatisfaction with the seemingly immovable institutions of marriage and motherhood and contributed to the suppression of feminist revolt.
Many of these criticisms dovetailed with the anti-psychiatry movement that was gaining momentum in Europe and the United States, and which led to deinstitutionalization. Asylums, and other forms of long-term psychiatric provision, were deeply flawed, and often violent, models of care. But what was designed to supersede them never materialized. The community care model that the state proposed as their replacement offered short-term initiatives, and, like most forms of care in the United States, was rapidly privatized.
Death of a Collective Movement
For defenders of neoliberalism, the boom unleashed by the free trade of the 1990s was supposed to usher in an era of global prosperity. But the Clinton administration also saw the first Democratic presidency in the era of post-history as an opportunity to dismantle the welfare state. Pathologizing narratives about single motherhood and teenage pregnancy were used to justify cuts to the public sector.
This ideology demonized women, particularly working-class African American women, who tended disproportionately to be carers. A feminist movement alert to these issues, rather than one focused on the prosperity of individual woman, was desperately needed. Instead, a brand of corporate feminism, sometimes referred to as the “third wave” and sometimes as “post-feminism,” interested largely in piercing “the glass ceiling” and leaning into business, was on the rise.
Central to radical feminism in postwar America was a critique of the structures of care — the couple, the family, the state. Radical feminists saw that a transformation of reproductive and domestic labor was crucial to bringing about more egalitarian social relations. This sat uneasily with the political developments of the 1980s and 1990s, which were grounded, as Melinda Cooper argues, in a retrenchment of family values. Supporters of the rollback of the welfare state took it for granted that care could be privatized: that families — implicitly women — would offer the support that the state failed to provide.
In the 2000s, there was an unexpected resurgence of feminist activity in the United States, first in response to the financial crash of 2008 and subsequently in response to the first inauguration of Donald Trump, whose punitive reproductive politics was framed as a moment of historic exceptionality. #metoo, the most notable movement to emerge from this moment, has been historicized as the story of exposés by women journalists at the New York Times, an institution that has its own history of hostility to feminism.
But feminism, at least as Firestone understood it, was not a project concerned primarily with the personal suffering of individual women — however much #metoo has been important in drawing out the serial logic of harassment, which creates an inexorable sense that masculinity is the meeting point of sexuality and power. The movement was an ambitious attempt to think about how labor could be redistributed and social structures transformed. But in focusing on the feelings of individual women, its power as a collective movement has been limited.
Airless Places, in its attention to the unglamorous aspects of trauma, poverty, numbing states of isolation, and structural power, refuses the consolations of neoliberal feminism. It is, like The Dialectic of Sex, a polemic, which happens to take the form of a collection of short stories, which is a reminder of the exhausting states of care work that are required to provide a sustainable alternative to the bottoming-out of state care provision. The book is dedicated to Lourdes Cintron, a caseworker who campaigned on Firestone’s behalf to provide her with medical care despite not having health insurance. Cintron was the center of a collective of women who over the years met weekly, offering Firestone a fragile network of care, support, and solidarity.
At Firestone’s memorial service, a seventy-eight-year-old Millett read a story, “Emotional Paralysis,” from Airless Places. “She was lucid, yes,” Firestone writes, “at what price. She sometimes recognised on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.” Firestone’s lucidity contains within it a fierce and uncompromising politics of refusal that would not forget what a more radical vision of life was supposed to offer. In this respect, her outlook is a world away from the affirmative spirit and spectral promises of “post-feminism.”