The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution 1st Edition

Shulamith Firestone's now classic work was an important influence on, and manifestation of, the 1970's women's movement. Firestone, an active participant in the Chicago and New York radical feminist scenes, captures the spirit of the movement, and the historical moement, in this work. Combining a material and feminist analysis of women's status in Western society, Firestone makes a case for revolution that may seem extreme to today's reader. However, this text is essential for understanding 1970's radical feminism and it is wonderful to have it back in print.

Shulamith Firestone (born 1945) is a Jewish, Canadian-born feminist, who was a founding member of the New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists.
Here are some quotations from this 1970 book:

"Freudianism subsumed the place of feminism as the lesser of two evils." (Pg. 69)
"Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath... The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression." (Pg. 81)
"Racism is a sexual phenomenon... racism is sexism extended." (Pg. 122)
"I draw three conclusions based on these differences: 1) That men can't love... 2) That women's 'clinging' behavior is necessitated by their objective social situation. 3) That this situation has not changed significantly from what it ever was." (Pg. 152)
"I submit, then, that the first demand for any alternative system 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... 2) The full self-determination, including economic dependence, of both women and children... 3) The total integration of women and children into all aspects of the larger society... 4) The freedom of all women and children to do whatever they wish to do sexually." (Pg. 236)

Shulamith Firestone's 1970 text calling for a radical re-thinking of the basis of modern social structures remains a powerful analysis of the state of patriarchy and the feminist movements of the Twentieth Centry. Firestone's central claim is that only in abolishing the sexual differences rooted in biology and reproduction can women, and by extension all humans, free themselves of the sex caste system which privileges men over women and children. In her book, she takes on important thinkers such as Freud and Marx, exposing their oversights and/or oppositions to a true revolution of sex. She ultimately looks to technology (cybernation) as the means by which humans can finally take control of reproductive necessity and correct the accident of Nature that insists on sexual difference and differential power dynamics.

you may not agree with her, but she was an excellent writer and a brilliant, brilliant mind, one that unfortunately was so bright it ended up as a supernova. her book of stories, "airless spaces," is in some ways better, and also a must read. i loved this woman in the 70s, and i love her more now. i won't apologize for it. any feminist worth his/her salt should read this if they haven't already. it's just plain required to fill in the whole gender roles/struggle/gap puzzle!

This is a brief excerpt from Is Biology Woman's Destiny? by Evelyn Reed:

But historically, before the patriarchal takeover, there was no such thing as male supremacy over women - or contrariwise, of female domination over men. The clan community was communistic; a sisterhood of women and a brotherhood of men. The keystone of that social structure was equality in all spheres of life, economic, social, and sexual. Thus women were not always oppressed. The oppression of women began as an integral part of an oppressive society that overturned and supplanted the old matriarchal commune.

The “avunculate theory” of eternal female oppression is only a more sophisticated variation of the “uterus theory” of female inferiority. The one, like the other, must be rejected by women of the liberation movement.

Unfortunately, this has not been done by some influential writers such as Kate Millett, although she is scornful of the proposition that biology is woman’s destiny. This fighter on the side of women’s liberation has been influenced by the anti-historical anthropologists. In her book Sexual Politics she writes that “both the primitive and civilized worlds are male worlds,” (p. 46) and that women have always been oppressed, if not by patriarchal men then by men of the “avunculate.” (p. 25) Oddly enough she takes this position while admitting she does not know whether or not there was a matriarchal period.

Shulamith Firestone in her book The Dialectic of Sex plunges even deeper into the error of the eternal oppression of women. She recites the whole man-made litany on this score. According to Firestone, female oppression is older than recorded history; it goes all the way back “to the animal kingdom itself.” (p. 2) Because of female biology, she says, productive work was beyond women’s strength-showing her ignorance of the extensive labor record of primitive women. Again, says the author, because of her biology woman “remained in bondage to life’s mysterious processes,” (p. 82) in which she takes over male designations for breeding and baby-tending. Thus, she concludes, women have been “at the continual mercy of their biology” which has made them “dependent on males,” whether these were clan brothers or husbands and fathers.

Firestone has fallen lock, stock, and barrel for the “uterus theory” of female inferiority. Sweeping aside Marx and Engels who, she says, knew “next to nothing about women as an “oppressed class,” she maintains that “it was woman’s reproductive biology that accounted for her original and continued oppression, and not some sudden patriarchal revolution.” (p. 83) Firestone, the feminist, parrots the antifeminist theme that “biology is woman’s destiny” without bothering to critically examine the facts.

It is unfortunate that even some women anthropologists have made similar errors despite their studies of the subject. Influenced, or perhaps intimidated, by the male-supremacist and bourgeois ideology which permeates anthropological circles, they too subscribe to the myth of the everlasting inferiority and oppression of women.

Evelyn Reed is also the author of Woman's Evolution from Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family,Problems of Women's Liberation,Sexism and Science; co-author of Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women and of Abortion Is a Woman's Right; and wrote the introduction to Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [Paperback] [1972] Friedrich Engels.