In Memoriam Dayna Tortorici

On Firestone
Preface

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Although in later years a private and often isolated person, the writer, artist, and feminist thinker Shulamith Firestone was at one time a formidable public force. A founder of the first radical feminist organizations in New York and co-editor of the first theoretical journals of the Womens Liberation Movement, she was one of the most memorable characters of the second wave. Brilliant, passionate, aggressive, and uncompromising in her beliefs, possessing an intellectual confidence that lives on in her work, Firestone embodied much of the radical energy of her era. She dared to be badas she declared women ought to in an editorial for Notes from the Second Yearwhich meant not just disobedient, but willing to fail. Women, Firestone knew, had to take risks to find liberation, even if it meant faltering in their first attempts. And although Firestone and her peers struggled to form and maintain a coherent womens movementand although their movement today is remembered as flawed and tenuousour world owes as much to their failures as their successes. Firestones wit was biting and aphoristic; her words sizzled on the page. With an almost anachronistic philosophical confidence she explained the world as she saw it without hesitation,

from the ground up. At age 25 she wrote the seminal book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)described by contemporaries as the little red book for women which for the first time united the then-irreconcilable discourses of Marxist analysis and feminist critique. And then, in a turn that still mystifies her admirers, she withdrew from both the movement and from public life. Decades later Firestone re-emerged with a small, startling book called Airless Spaces (1998), a fictionalized chronicle of her later life, that spoke in vignettes to her years spent in and out of mental hospitals. But as if unsatisfied by this account, admirers of her early work still wondered: Why had she left? Where had she gone? For how few know of Firestones incalculable contribution to womens liberation, fewer still know that she saw herself first and foremost as an artist. Her friends from the movement admired her as a seemingly pure revolutionary, seeking change for changes sake; but Firestone herself aspired to a profound creative freedom for which social, civil, and sexual liberties were only the means. As part of a literary proposal she once wrote (under the header ANTICREDENTIALSa cover letter from the counter-culture), Firestone explained, I came to New York to pursue a painting and writing career. Finding it nearly impossible at that time (1967) for a woman to make it legitimately, I instead gave my creative energy to founding a womens liberation movement. After years of concentrated political activity, she wrote, I deserve to unite these split personalities: artist and politico. Firestone never did unite those two pursuits, at least not publicly. She continued to paint and to write, but in later years was plagued by mental illness and stymied by the medications and institutions that kept her from self-destruction. She continued to make friends, but was prone to fall out of touch, and the last years of her life were marked by self-imposed isolation. In late August of 2012, Firestone reportedly was found dead in her apartment on East 10th Street, where she lived alone. She was 67 years old. The first news of her death read like a cautionary talea wake-up call for women who choose to reject the security of conventional family life. Later stories gave a fuller portrait of a woman who was loved and supported by family and friends, but who nevertheless slipped away. Obituaries further described the loss of a fearless writer and thinker whose work remains underappreciated, and among younger readers, largely unknown. In an effort to do justice to Firestones memory, and to encourage readers to revisit her work, the artist Beth Stryker and I have assembled remembrances from many of her friends, family, and followers here. To set the record straight is an impossible task. Everyone remembers a different Shulamith, and the following imbricated accounts may overlap without ever quite aligning. Friends called her Shulie; family called her Shuley; according to her sister, Firestone wrote both, and in later life she insisted on Shulamith. To honor them all, we have left these variations as they appear. Other inconsistencies, repetitions in the record, and different ideas about her have been allowed to stand, with the hope that the connections linking these writers to Firestone, her particular moment, and her legacy come alive on the page. Firestone was memorialized at St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery this past Sunday, in the neighborhood where she spent most of her life. For the service Kate Millett read a segment from Airless Spacesthe same passage she references in her contributionand then paused to

address the audience. We should remember Shulie, she said. We should remember her, because she was one hell of a woman. And she gave us one hell of a ride. We should remember her. We lost our nerve, all of us, together. Lets get it back. Those of us who never knew Firestone cannot remember her as those who knew her can. But we can drum up the nerve that Firestone wielded in life. On Shulamith Firestone, Part One This section of remembrances were compiled and edited in collaboration with Beth Stryker, as part of the Shulamith Firestone Memorial Pamphlet (September 23, 2012). On Shulamith Firestone, Part Two

On Shulamith Firestone, Part One

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This is the first of two segments on Shulamith Firestone. Read the intro here, and Part Two here. Part One was edited in collaboration with Beth Stryker, as part of the Shulamith Firestone Memorial Pamphlet (September 23, 2012). I first met Shulie over Labor Day Weekend in 1967, at the National Conference for New Politics an unsuccessful attempt to unite the organized left behind a presidential ticket that would campaign against the war in Viet Nam. A couple of women who were not themselves part of the

left had persuaded the conference organizers to give them some space for a womens caucus. Black caucuses at such meetings were common and accepted, but one for women was by itself radical. Shulie was one of about four dozen women who met daily to hammer out a resolution that called attention to womens issuesequal pay, childcare, abortion on demand, and other things that today dont seem very radical. She didnt say much, but what she did say stuck in my mind. I would now characterize her views as radical feminism uncontaminated by left-wing rhetoric something one didnt encounter much of in those days. When we took the womens caucus resolution to the resolutions committee we were told that we were too late: the agenda already had a resolution on women, and there was only time for one. That resolution was written by members of Women Strike for Peace, none of whom had attended the womens caucus; it was about peace, not women. I walked out mad. I probably would have gone home had I not run into Shulie. At first, she didnt believe what I told her. But after she found out for herself, she was angrier than I was. Alone, neither of us would have done anything, but together we fed on each others rage. We decided to propose a substitute resolution when the Women Strike for Peace language was read for discussion before voting the next day. We stayed up all night revising the womens caucus resolution. The more we talked, the more radical it got. We printed copies and passed them out. By the time the agenda reached the womens resolution, a handful of us stood at the microphone, our hands stretched high, waiting to be recognized to propose our substitute. After reading the womens resolution, meeting chair William Pepper didnt recognize any of us. All in favor, all opposed, motion passed, he said. Next resolution. As we stood there in shock, a young man pushed his way in front of us. He was instantly recognized by the chair. Turning to face the crowded room, the young man said, Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to speak for the forgotten American, the American Indian. Infuriated at being forgotten, we rushed the podium, where the men only laughed. When Shulie reached Pepper, he literally patted her on the head. Cool down, little girl, he said. We have more important things to do here than talk about womens problems. Shulie didnt cool down, and neither did I. We put together a list of every woman we knew who might be interested in working on womens issues and invited them to a meeting at my Chicago apartment. What came to be called the West Side Group met for seven months. Shulie only stayed a month before moving to New York; her sister Laya took her place in our group. Shulie took with her the names of some New York women interested in womens issues. With them, she founded the first womens liberation groups in New York. For the next couple years we stayed loosely in touch. When The Dialectic of Sex was published in 1970, she inscribed the copy she gave me. To Jo: With Whom It All Began.

By 1975, Shulie had faded away. I had to track her down to give her a copy of my first book when it was published that year. Years later, I was told by others of her mental illness and its effects, but I didnt see it myself. We reconnected for a few years when her next book, Airless Spaces, was published in 1998. She invited several of her old friends to celebrate. She seemed fine, but others told me that she wasnt. The last time I saw Shulie was in 2000, at the book party Gloria Steinem hosted for my latest book. Even though they lived only three miles apart, they had never met. Gloria told her how honored she was to meet the author of such an important early feminist book. They hugged, and they talked. Shulie and I managed to stay in touch through 2003. Afterward, I only got her voicemail when I called, and no reply to my emails. Carol Giardina and Kathie Sarachild kept me apprised of her ups and downs through 2007. After that, none of us could reach her. The next time I heard of Shulie was when I got word of her death. Thinking back on those years and Shulies contribution to the womens liberation movement, I see Shulie as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky. And then she disappeared. Jo Freeman

I first met Shulie in New York in the fall of 1967 at the apartment of Bill Price, a writer for the National Guardian, an independent left movement newspaper. They both had recently been at the NCNP conference in Chicago, where Bill had witnessed the incident of Shulie being patted on the head and told to make way for more important issues when she tried to read a list of womens demands. Bill was aware of my growing interest in feminism and said she was someone I just had to meet. He was right. Shulie was livid about the treatment of the feminists at the NCNP and she wasnt afraid to show it. Her anger was right on target. She was obviously a doer and an organizer, as well as a thinker. As a result of this meeting, I became an early member of New York Radical Women, which Shulie was organizing with Pam Allen. Kathie Sarachild and I had been talking about the possibility of a movement for womens liberation, but it was Shulie and Pam who actually called that first meeting in New York that made history and changed the direction of many lives, including mine. NYRWs first action was at the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, a womens peace march in Washington, DC in January 1968. Shulie was very clear from the beginning that we should go there to point out the futility of women protesting the war when we had so little real political strength ourselves. There were others in NYRW who were not so sure this was the right tack to take, but Shulie, as always, stood her ground. She also took a leading hand in shaping the details of the protest itself, bringing her humor, her creativity, her political insights, and her passionate

insistence that the oppression of women be on the front burner. Then she followed through with a public analysis of the action, printed in Notes from the First Year, for others to learn from. She had such courage. I listened in awe as she spoke out in front of a big New York City cathedral about what an unwanted pregnancy was like for women and the need for legal abortion. It was at a demonstration in support of Bill Baird, who was facing a jail sentence for his abortion and birth control activism. She really laid it on the line, and this was early 1968, before abortion was something you talked about in public or even with friends. Instead of berating women who didnt show up at the rally, she publicly acknowledged her own fears about coming out for free abortion and pointed out how real social power was brought to bear against women who stepped out of line. Notes from the First Year was her baby, but she didnt try to control its content by editing or vetting, as far as I know. It was a group project. Most women brought their articles to the Southern Conference Educational Fund office mimeograph machine ready to run. Shulie did write several of the articles, which showed the range of her knowledge and activism. There was an eye-opening history of the 19th-century womens rights movement, ending with three lessons she thought we should learn from it. All of them are still relevant: dont compromise basic principles for political expediency; womens consciousness must be raised first in order for us to use any single-issue freedoms we might win in the lefts struggle; and when women make alliances with other oppressed groups, they must demand a piece of the pie before they fight for it. She also wrote Women Rap About Sex, a seriously funny piece based on a consciousnessraising meeting. It was unsigned, but it really captured her biting wit. Shulie went on to help found Redstockings and then New York Radical Feminists and to edit Notes from the Second Year with Anne Koedtall by 1970. The second Notes carried a broad roundup of the thinking and actions evolving in the WLM and added to the Movements amazing upsurge. Many people consider The Dialectic of Sex Shulies major contribution, but I believe these early writings and actions are even more crucial to understanding the early Womens Liberation Movement and her leadership in it. Ive heard that later in life Shulie preferred the more formal Shulamith. But Shulie was what she called herself back in those years when she had a big impact on my life. I hope she would forgive that she lives vividly in my memory, mind, and heart as Shulie. Carol Hanisch

I remember Shulie once saying to me: The revolution will begin when women stop smiling. She sure had that right. I first met Shulie in September 1967 at the New Politics Conference in ChicagoI had come from New York with Florynce Kennedy and Peg Brennanwhere I encountered both her and Jo

Freeman for the first time. We introduced ourselves at the mimeograph machine, running off copies of our feminist resolutions. What else was happening in the summer and fall of 1967? There were the ColumbiaSDS sit-ins and university takeover; the Black Power Conference in Newark, in July; the March on the Pentagon in October. Historically, womens movements have arisen within the context of widespread social unrest. Ours was no exception. We were greatly influenced by the civil rights movement; the National Organization for Women (started in 1966) called itself the NAACP for women. By 196768, some of us were more inspired by black power. I came to know Anne Koedt better than Shulie, but they were often together. I remember both from early 1968, when Anne called me to compare notes on womens rights (I was president of the New York chapter of NOW at that time). We discovered right away that there was a natural alliance between some members of Radical Women and some of the younger, more radical women in NOW. This alliance initially focused on our willingness to take public stands on socalled sexual issues, beginning with abortion. There was no intention at this time to subsume feminism under any sexual revolution. I remember both Anne and Shulie came with me to Philadelphia the day after Martin Luther King was killed. My speech was entitled: Vaginal Orgasm as a Mass Hysterical Survival Response. I was very grateful for their support! Radical Women was also in general much less freaked out by Valerie Solanas than NOW was. I remember Shulie and Anne both came up to my place for Valeries birthday party. It was a small party. After I left NOW, Anne and I worked together organizationally. I never did so with Shulie, but we were always friendly and enjoyed many political conversations together. Later, for the 1970 Ladies Home Journal sit-in, a group of women in media put out a call to the general womens movement for support. Shulie and I both responded. The editor, John Mack Carter, ended up sitting atop his desk, with some 100 women seated at his feet on the floor. Many hours dragged on with little progress for the media womens demands. The situation was ghastly. Shulie and I were there in support, but were forced into this humiliating position: the sultan on top, his harem below. What to do? FinallyI dont remember why or howShulie and I threatened to throw this guy out the window (we were many floors up). Some of the women in media protected him. I most fondly remember Shulamith Firestone as never a patient woman. She didnt take shit. At leastnever with a smile. Ti-Grace Atkinson

I had seen her at meetings of New York Radical Women, the earliest WLM group in New York City, which she, fresh from Chicago, had organized in 1967. I didnt know the name of that fierce presence with the thick black mane and piercing eyes, but among the fifty or sixty women who met regularly in a large downtown hall to talk about the new ideas of womens liberation, she, with her startling opinions and analytical prowess, made an impression on me.

After NY Radical Women grew too large for everyone to be heard, we decided to meet in smaller groups. With Ellen Willis, she co-founded the group called Redstockings. When I attended my first Redstockings consciousness-raising (CR) meeting, I learned her name: Shulamith Firestone. Even then she was editing the groundbreaking Notes from the First Year. The CR subject at my first Redstockings meeting was sexalways a hot topic, but at that moment, in the early days of WLM, one that so roused womens resentment of being mistreated by men that there was barely room to sit on the floor of that small East Village apartment, across the street from a concurrent meeting of WITCH (Womens International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and down the block from the New York headquarters of Hells Angels. For CR, every woman speaks in turn about her experience. That night the room was so packed, and the subject of sex so explosive, that it took weeks of meetings before everyone had spoken on the topic. Seated in our rough circle, I was about four people ahead of Shulie. When it was my turn to speak, I described how, when I became pregnant with our second child, my husband took up with other women, and I responded by eventually taking a lover of my own. I spoke of my fear that if he should discover my love affair he would abandon our children. In the room I felt sympathetic vibes for my testimony, but what Shulie took from it was something entirely unexpected. An attractive, forceful heterosexual woman, shed had any number of lovers (though not, apparently, at that moment), but none, she said, had treated her as an equal. She was enraged by the power disparity between the sexes that enabled men to treat her any way they wanted and get away with it. If sheif womenmade demands, the men could simply walk away and quickly find someone else. Then she turned her piercing eyes on me, pointed her finger, and said: You have two men and I have none. Its unfair. I didnt take it personally; she was addressing the question of scarcity and pointing out that just as there was no justice in the conduct of sexual relations, there was none in its distribution, either. Who but Shulie would be able to step back and see it as another aspect of what we then called male supremacy? She was energized by righteous anger. More than anyone Ive known, she was able to harness negative emotions around herresentment, outrage, confusion, sadness, hurt, and moreand turn them into the kind of rage needed to fuel a revolutionary movement. After another summer or two, our Redstockings group died of burnout and attrition. Shulie had long since decamped to co-found yet another important WLM organization, New York Radical Feminists, which I joined upon the demise of our Redstockings groupas usual, several steps behind her. Three of the most important movement organizations in New York City were founded by her and would not have existed without her; in hindsight I see I was, unwittingly, dogging her footsteps. Soon afterward, she left the movement. I lost sight of her until 1997, when she came to Barnes & Noble for the launch party for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of my first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. I had written it back when I was in the groups she founded, and it burned

with the insights her work had sparked. I have a photo of us together taken at that book party, posing with two more old Redstockings, Irene Peslikis and Corrine Coleman, who are now both deceased. Shulie was writing her own collection of short stories then, the spare and moving Airless Spaces, based on her time in and out of a mental hospital. Debilitated by medications (as she describes in Airless Spaces), she could do little to publicize her new book. I had the honor of helping arrange a group reading from the book and to be among the readers. Her inscription in my treasured copy of Airless Spaces shows her generosity: To Alix, With enormous thanks for a wonderful reading and for being a great role model. I, her follower, a role model? For what? Persistence? Survival? She was the one whose visionary ideas and organizing passion had forever changed our lives. Alix Kates Shulman

There were two major divisions in the Womens Liberation Movement: the uptown women and the downtown women. Kate Millett and I both were founding members of NOW NY. She and Fumio Yoshimura were artists and lived in a loft on the Bowery, but somehow she landed in NOW. When we first heard of Radical Women and read its magazine, Kate said, Lets go, Ill join any feminist group around. I happily agreed, and took off with her, miniskirt, eye-makeup and all, and sailed into a possibly rent-controlled flat south of 14th Street. I was impressed with Shulies writing, as most people are: its cogent, original, seminal, stimulating, and bursting with brilliance. It was Shulie who marched up to me, as the other downtowners eyed me warily, and got straight to the point: Ive heard so many terrible things about you, I knew I had to meet you. Already captivated by her mind, I was bowled over by her beauty. The masses of curly, dark hair and sensuous mouth, set above a curvy, well-proportioned body; she could have been an adored icon of European cinema. Big, all-seeing, black-brown eyes, magnified by granny glasses, held a steady gaze as she looked at my face, in my eyes; none of that invasive, insulting, old up-and-down we get from too many women, sizing up the merchandise or the competition, so to speak. I fell in love with all of her, and though we rarely met, we would speak for hours on the phone about everything. Mostly we spoke of ideas, ours and those of other feminists, and much more. Even men. She approved of my feminist theater project (pronouncing it theetur) and we often discussed how best she might honor her ambition. She absorbed Mailers Advertisements for Myself, and explained her strategy for making her mark as an artist. She felt the book she was writing would put her on the map, easing her transition to recognition as a painter. She anguished over a New Yorker article about a Redstockings CR group: names and professions had been changed, but she felt she was recognizable and that the ironic tone of the piece would damage her credibility. Often hard up for money, she told me about interviewing for a topless waitress gig, a horror show she briefly considered out of desperation: it paid better for less time than other menial jobs. Of course she fled. After the first dough came in from the book, she was mugged on the street by some homegirls with a knife. She told them that she lived in the neighborhood (Alphabet City in the raw), and that she was far from prosperous. They rifled through her

waistpack anyway, and waving in her face the little checkbook they found, said accusingly, So whats this? I talked myself hoarse to get her to stop feeling guilty for the little bit of success she had earned with her hard work. And it did cost her. I lost her for weeks and months as she kept the phone unplugged to concentrate on writing. Then shed surface again. One day she left the country and vanished altogether. I grilled everyone I could think of, but got only vague answers. I received the odd postcard, always with a terse message, like this one from Africa: Hi Anselma. Bye. Shulie. I never stopped looking for her. In the 80s Susan Brownmiller said shed seen her wandering around an organic restaurant with paperback books falling out of her pockets. When at long last I found her a few years ago, she was curt on the phone and said she had no interest in seeing anyone from back then. It was a body blow. Not long after, she wrote to say that after my call, she felt a surge of love for me in her heart. Mine leapt. On my next trip to New York we met downtown, but my Shulie was AWOL for good. She said the medication she was on destroyed her ability to think and write. I was unable to get through the thick curtain of blues she drew around her like a shroud. I asked if I could take her book to an Italian publisher and she quickly sent me one her sister had written, too. Even in her misery, she was thoughtful. We never met again. Then, I mourned the loss of her lan vital, hostage to implacable forces. Now that she is dead, I grieve anew with fresh sorrow. She burned so bright, the flames consumed her; yet the mark she left on the worldand on my soulis indelible. I love you, Shulie. Bye. Anselma. Anselma DellOlio

I first read about the womens liberation movement in the fall of 1967, in an article in the Guardianeither the article mentioned Pam Allen or was by Pam Allen. I was immediately excited and called her and asked to join. I was tired of engaging in movements for peace dominated by men. She never told me about a meetingI think, in retrospect, because I sounded too radical and antimale. However, I went to the Jeanette Rankin Brigade march. There, when I saw the Burial of the Old Womanhood, I made contact with Jenny Gardner and Kathie Sarachild. We talked the whole train ride back. Kathie said they were looking for a meeting place and I volunteered my apartment (a fact verified in my FBI file). At that first meeting I remember Anne Forer, who was winding her underarm hair and asking how exactly were we all oppressed. The answers were exciting. I dont remember Shulie until we started meeting at Southern Christian Educational Office, at Broadway and 10th St. I loved her fierce, definitive statements, especially because I was a on the one hand, on the other hand, this and that type. I used her as a role model and tried to imitate her militant convictions. After meeting, we Lower East SidersAnne Forer, Shulie, Irene Peslikis, Linda Feldman, Judith Duffett, and otherswould go to Ratners and rehash the meeting and just talk. I was married, had a young kid, and a regular job, and that made me different. But I loved the talk, especially about the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we had been oppressed since childhood, and about current male/female affairs, probably because I was

weighed down with responsibility. Shulie talked lots about men, and especially Abbie Hoffman. She knew all those guys. I know it doesnt sound like the serious Shulie, but boy talk and sexuality were part of her life then. I also remember talking about having a party of all us radical feminists. Shulie and I were the only ones who voted for having men at the party. We thought it would be more fun. My next clear memory of Shulie was her visiting Paris and wanting to tell Simone de Beauvoir about our movement. She organized us all to write articles for Notes From the First Year bring to de Beauvoir. I hadnt seen Shulie as a leader of the group, but she was the spark that made things happen. She solicited articles, helped edit them, and put them together. She didnt think she should share in the menial tasks, like collating and stapling, as she was the brain behind it, but I think we convinced her to take part in all aspects. As I remember, Shulie told us de Beauvoir was underwhelmed. Nonetheless, the effort was important and made us all consider the significance of the movement we had made. She understood from the beginning that the WLM was revolutionary. After the disastrous SDS antiwar march and speech, Shulie and Ellen Willis started Redstockings. I believe Marilyn Webb, whose husband Lee was a honcho in SDS, had convinced the Mobilization Committee to allow a woman to speak at the giant march and anti-inaugural ball. Shulie wrote a speech that was militant and eloquentan indictment of men who benefited from the age-old oppression of women and a call on women to revolt. But neither Shulie nor Marilyn Webb could speak, because SDS guys soared onto the stage, saying, Take her off the stage and fuck her! The stage began to sink and David Dellinger, the MC, called for order, but he didnt demand that the men behave or allow the women to speak. This confirmed to Shulie, Ellen, and others that male chauvinism was alive and well on the New Left. Shulie and Ellen left Redstockings after a short while. They wanted more militant action and less consciousness raising, and to do other things. By this time Shulie had begun working on The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, the major book of second-wave feminism. I remember reading it and marveling that it contained the material we had been discussing for years, but Shulie drew new conclusions and put the insights in a new framework. During this period, leaders and those who accomplished things on their own were often attacked by the WLM. It was ugly and destructive. I always admired those who accomplished more, but then I too was attacked for being in the media, on The David Susskind Show. I hardly saw Shulie after that, except at Anne Forers, and then they were discussing astrology. Shulie wasnt easy. I remember that when told me she was writing a book, I mentioned Philip Ariess Century of Childhood. She wanted to borrow it. When I asked for it back, she said she had better use for it than I did. She did, as I saw in her book. The next time I saw Shulie was in the 1990s, after she had been hospitalized. I was part of a support group that visited her and kept tabs on her whereabouts. The group was made up of her family, a nurse, a social worker, and a few friends. Until about 2010 Id visit Shulie, or shed visit me, and we went to museums, poetry readings, and movies, maybe once every two months sometimes more, sometimes less. I also remember trying to teach her how to use email. Id

often try to reach her and she wouldnt answer her phone or emails. She had a poor, old computer. I tried getting her a better one, but she wanted to stick with what she knew. She still painted, and had written a book on art and feminism in an innovative form after The Dialectic of Sex, but she told me her publisher had rejected it. She wrote something else and showed it to people, who said it wasnt good, and though I volunteered to read it I never saw it. By this time Shulie was much changed, low-key and mellow, but she still had interesting insights and was good company. We spoke much of her dilemma: if she took the medicine she was sane, but couldnt create; if she didnt take the awful drugs she was creative, but self-destructive. Her more recent paintings were abstract, with greens in them; they werent the wonderful, dark portraits or drawings from her early years. When I went to Irenes memorial, Shulie didnt want to go, although she was friendly with Irene. She encouraged me to get back a painting shed given Richard, Irenes husband. I got it and she was genuinely relieved and thankful. She wasnt too interested in feminism, and she grew quiet when more than three people were around. But she still went to the Left Forum and poetry readings and out to dinner with me, and liked seeing old feminists. I feel awful that Shulie is being so much more honored and cared for in death than she was in life. Rosalyn Baxandall

This is how it is: I could maunder on vaguely and sentimentally about that astounding year after I attended the founding meeting of New York Radical Feminists in November, 1969. But, to my eternal regret, I took no notes. I remember so few specifics. I had just returned from graduate school in England when I attended the meeting at the insistence of an old friend, Cellestine Ware, who told me something important was happening. Within those few hours I became a feminist activist, the start of what has become a lifetime of engagement. Shulie was certainly central to that intense beginning. Her presence was luminous; she was a knife cutting through everything. But what exactly did we tell each other during all those hours and hours? I dont know. One of the hardest things to remember is earlier states of mind. And the New Yorker piece by Jane Kramer about her months in our group wont help much. For some reason, this otherwise intelligent writer had a tin ear for all we said. She thought these new passionate feminists were unpleasant maniacs; we were not unpleasant maniacs. The best source is Alice Echols in Daring to be Bad. A great historian, Alice picked patiently through piles of evidence, faithfully reconstructing what she could of who we were then: sometimes nave or silly, often original and wonderful. I do remember the excitement, the joy, of that brief time, when we met every week and Shulie was writing away at her great book. In first efforts at homage, I have written about Dialectic twice: in 1970 in a review for the first feminist radio show in the US, Womankind, produced by Nanette Rainone of WBAI and, then, twenty-five years later, for Dissent on the occasion of the Dialectics long overdue republication. Both times I found the book remarkable, though the

melancholy of the longue dure did invade the second piece. In the years between these two takes, Shulies book had often been demonized, not only by its inevitable detractors but often by feminists, too. I argued in Dissent in 1994 that people were missing the genre in which Shulie was writing: she was a utopian visionary: This sort of person appears (is created? is momentarily heard?) at the beginning of movements. Magnificent and stunned by insight, they tell us we must change our lives; the way we live is intolerable. Then they stagger off, leaving the less moonstruck but considerably brightened to try to live the insight out. But, there is something more than praise, something important that Ive never written about: my deep sense of indebtedness to Shulamith Firestone. She dared in a way I never could have dared. When I think of Shulie, it is not to those now mythical meetings I return, not even to the astonishing book, but to the very beginning of our movement for womens liberation, that scene in 1967 in Chicago when Shulie and Jo Freeman faced humiliation, sexual insult, and ridicule, responding to men of the left with rage and magnificent indignation. Where did they find the nerve, the strength, to confront male contempt? Ive wondered about this for many years. It was a time of outrage, indeed, but their rage was a special, personal brew; out of a complex amalgam of private reasons and individual genius, they stepped outside our common female desire to be acceptable to men, to stay within their good books, dependent on them for either love or livelihood. Shulie and Jo invented an indignation and a new vision of how women are oppressed that we all embraced ten minutes later. But I, for one, could never have made that leap into rage and new hopefulness without them. Like many women, I simply was too ashamed, too vulnerable to male insult to contemplate what they imagined. But once they made their extraordinary leap, thousands of us followed. I dont know if I can speak for others, but I needed them. They made honorable and magnificent a claim that most men then assumed was stupid, narcissistic, vaunting, girlish, shameful, and sad. Does this characterization of the gender scene back then sound exaggerated? Its not. Again: one of the hardest things to remember is earlier states of mind. The sexism and female self-doubt of those times is hard to recover, even for those of us who were there. I loved Shulie, but it was hard to stay close. I see that in her remembrance of Shulie, Jo Freeman has quoted what Shulie wrote in her copy of The Dialectic of Sex. This emboldens me (as she and Shulie have always and will always embolden me) to quote what Shulie wrote in my copy: Sept 1970 Dear Anne I want you to knowthough I still urge you for your sake to try a little masculine selfishness that I too basked in your kindness and rare understanding all the long winter that I wrote this book. All love and good wishes, Shulie I wouldnt mind having this as my epitaph. She indentified my habit of compliance, of, alas, alltoo-female self-sacrifice, but so kindly. She urged me to be more like her, willing to take off and be free.

Ann Snitow

For a long time, our movement was haunted by the terrible absence of Shulamith Firestone. The disappearance of so shining and brilliant a star always reminded me of Sylvia Plaths sudden demise. Peoplefeminists toohave always mourned young genius cut down too soon. Only in this case, Shulie was very much alive. Either she was holed up in her fifth floor apartment in the East Village or holed up in a hospital. She was still here, without really being here. I remember reading The Dialectic of Sex when it first came out in 1970. I was writing Women and Madness and this book inspired and challenged me to dare even more. The work is fierce, as sharp as a diamondlogically precise, somewhat frightening, and extremely liberating. I will never forget how her chapter on Love (as an illness) made me laugh out loud with relief. And the fabulous Notes from the First and Second Years! Shulie was the editor-in-chief, Anne Koedt the associate editor. The collection was bliss, true badass bliss. (Koedt, by the way, wrote The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm in Notes from the Second Year.) Weand the rest of Americahad never seen anything like us before. Cracked, belligerent, misguided, and strangers to each other, radical feminists were giants on the earth. Since the mother-daughter relationship had been painful and humiliating for many of us, we called each other sisters. But as Ti-Grace Atkinson quipped: Sisterhood is powerfulit can kill sisters. Although we knew that this was true, most feminists denied that it was really true. Many years later, Shulie and I were talking. She said: Phyllis, if only you had written Womans Inhumanity to Woman long ago, it might have saved our movement. I told her that no book, at the time, could have reversed our own internalized sexism, competition, and indirect aggression toward other women. Many feminist leaders had been nervous about my writing the book, and their disapproval stayed my hand for years. Why did you listen to them? she asked. She was a bit agitated. Once, before this conversation, Shulie had called and asked me to visit her in my capacity as a psychotherapist. I immediately agreed. However, she said I would need to come to the fifth floor by climbing up the fire escape. She would talk to me through the window. I told her I couldnt. I might fall to earth and shatter. Still, I could not persuade her to open her door. Her second book Airless Spaces is a small and tender gem. Humbly, carefully, she wrote about her madness and her time in various asylums. When it was published, she asked a small group of us, myself included, to read aloud from it and we did. I remember that Shulie stood off a bit, watching, listening, perhaps approving of her words and of our reading. But she remained silent, at a remove. Always removed.

For many years now I have kept a list of the feminists weve lost. At one memorial service in 1987 in a large West Village courtyard I saw the faces of many second wavers: they were ashen, shocked, stunned, frightened. I remember speaking and doing a ritual at a memorial service for our lesbian feminists gone probably in the early 1990s. We have lost so many dear friends. And now, Shulie has joined them. But her work will continue to inspire women to dare to be brave, to understand that heroism is our only alternative. May she rest in peace, and may her memory be as a blessing. Phyllis Chesler

I remember Shulie. We all do. Even people who never met heronly read her. Probably they remember her best. We always put the best part of ourselves in our books. The rest is gossip and trash. Opinions, even disdain. There was a lot to object to in her books. After all, Shulie was making the case for Marxism and for sexual freedom. Reshaped entirely, with the kibbutzim writ large; even group infant-care by both sexes so the female would not be borne down with the barbarity of pregnancy and childcare. It was, of course, just poppycock and dream vision. It was also, on the other hand, a huge paradigm shift to imagine liberating human sexuality from millennia of patriarchy. We all had notions like that once. We had all been driven by the cruelty of sexual abuse and predation, and cried out that it stop. At once. We hadnt yet entered upon rape and genital mutilation, the enslavement of women as property. We didnt even have a good idea of what we were up against. It seems Shulie did. Which was odd. She was one of the youngest among us when The Dialectic of Sex hit print. Way too young for the onslaught. I was ten years older than Shulie when Sexual Politics came into print, teaching English up at Barnard and married to Fumio, a Japanese sculptor who had been through the War and was even a feminist. Still, I went a little crazy too, endlessly having to repeat myself. The real problem with patriarchy: its an entire social system of status, temperament, and rolecenturies old. We regard it as nature. The Movement, but also Fumio, cheered me on; we all had a hilarious time laughing at the conceit of Mailer and Miller. It was outrageous fun even to say these things aloud. The wind blew hard at times: my family tried to control me with psychiatry but finally gave up. Eventually, I went off to England to make a movie. But imagining what Shulie went through in America. She didnt just refuse to mince words over literary criticism; she took on the whole show of capitalist society. How was it for her with the malice of the critics, the talk show hosts, anti-Semitism, the residual mess of anticommunism?

Shulie had lived inside the Movement; she had no idea yet of the real world. It destroyed her, overwhelmed her. Burned her alive, consumed her. She went in and out of asylums. She wrote: reading Dantes Inferno . . . and at a quite a good clip, too. But out of the hospital, she couldnt even get down a fashion rag. The isolation, unreality. The medication and the fright of the experience had devastated her. We tried to get together once to help, with The American Civil Liberties Union, even just to get them to leave her in peace, to leave her alone. We lost. Its hard to argue against family, against doctors, against a whole society. Finally a text did emerge, an experimental thing pretending to be fiction. Airless Spaces. Unheralded, unadvertised. It was her account of the useless days on the ward, without any rights or voice or purpose. It is a terribly sad and harrowing account of a fine mind, wasted. It tells more than any other book of what we do to people with a few ideas. In other places you get lined up and shot. In America you get drowned out, locked away, made even less authentic. Shulie looks back at us, the beautiful long hair she seemed to hide behind, her owl-like glasses she used to take off when everyone talked at once and wouldnt listen to her speak. She was beautiful and somehow inscrutable, with something fragile and youthful about hera mystery. I remember her from so many meetings, then she disappeared. Other feminists dominated the scene; other voices, other books, other fads, and figures; secondary sources. The New York Times predicted feminisms death very solemnly. Twice already. So far. Shulie died alone, not found until days after her death. Her book hardly read anymore but still assigned in classes. A newspaper reports that the building super found her body; her landlord proclaims she was once a prodigy. He also claims mere strangers paid her rent. Strange how much of it has come true without our even noticing it. How maliciously it has been applied: babies are purchased by blue-eyed Americans at a price in order to avoid the trouble of pregnancy; male medicine rules the world, charging more and more for its services. If youre rich, you can buy any organ. Not what Shulie had in mind at all. Maybe we could reconsider how we have turned her utopian vision into our own nightmare, as we converted her bright promise at 25 into the voices in her head that made her life hideous. I recently read of a young man who kept beating up his refrigerator, pummeling it with cobblestones, calling it St. Frigid. A silly thing to do. Of course, hes an artist and now famous. Good thing Shulie never tried that; shed have been carted off in a moment. Consider what a refrigerator means to a man versus what it means to a woman. Women were not rolling much steel in Shulies time; few of us had even heard of Kelvin or had any notion of how the damn thing ran.

Shulie went on writing and painting. The world continued to call her crazy. All authorities agreed: she was a paranoid schizophrenic. By that time she was mostly on meds and resigned to her fate; silenced effectively. In the enormous despair of your last days, Shulie, what of that solitude? You wrote other things: what were they? Whom, what, did you choose to paint? What were your paintings like? What will happen to your work? Kate Millett

What Shulamith Firestone will best be remembered for is The Dialectic of Sex, the manifesto she wrote arguing for womens liberation from their reproductive biology. What I will remember her forone of many things, but the one that was most important to me, at a critical moment in my lifeis how she helped liberate me into my own biology. I got to know Shuley when I was still in high school in University City, just embarking on my first affair. Her sister Laya was my classmate and friend, and we were part of what we thought of as the bohemian set. Shuley was a couple of years older than us, rooming at the time with a woman who was in the Catholic Worker movement. Somehow the Catholic Workers and a bunch of us high-school kids had found each other through the civil rights movement and become friends. They were older and seemed like the most glamorous people in the world to me selfless, idealistic, dedicated to the poor and the downtrodden. We Shall Overcome was our anthem on the picket lines, and we believed in it. A strange concept of glamor to be sure, perhaps available only to the very young and nave, and perhaps only at that particular moment in time. I no longer remember why I went to Shuley for advice about how to get birth control, but I do recall what she told me to do: Go to Planned Parenthood. Show up wearing a ring on your left hand and tell them youre marriedbecause for whatever reason (no doubt something mandated by the morals police of the time), PP was not allowed to dispense the pill to unmarried women. And so I did. This was how I obtained a prescription for those little dial-a-pill packs that, in those days, were salvation for anyone trying to avoid getting pregnant. My next memory of Shuleymy memories are like disconnected snapshots, taken at long intervalswas when I was at the University of Chicago and she was at the Art Institute. Now I was married, but still very nave, very unsophisticated. Shuley invited my new husband and me to Thanksgiving dinner, and we showed up only to discover a raw turkey, since Shuley, never known for her domestic talents, had no idea what to do with it. Neither did we, but my husband was actually something of a cook and figured out what had to be donequite simply, putting it in the oven, for what was, of course, a very long time, which made for a very long evening. It was an evening made even longer in my mind by Shuley, who passed the time unpacking ideas for the book she would eventually publish several years laterideas that were not just foreign to the earnest, romantic, and at heart conventional girl that I was, but actively repellent. Not have children? Shocking! Or have them via some kind of futuristic technology? Beyond weird! Men as the enemy? Not my man! Eventually I retired to the bedroom, sobbing quietly into a pillow, if I recall correctly, leaving Shuley to debate her revolutionary ideas with my husbanda man who loved nothing more than a verbal slugfest with anyone, from Shulamith Firestone to the Seventh Day Adventists who used to show up at our door peddling their pamphlets.

I eventually left Chicago to go to graduate school, and while I was doing that Shuley published her book and became famous. The ideas were no more appealing to me in book form than they had been over raw turkey, but one of the most brilliant women I know today remembers what it was like to have that book in her hands. Prose on fire, she said, adding that she always wondered what would happen to the author, because a mind of that intensity would be hard to carry around. And so it proved to be. When I next encountered Shuley, many years later, when we both lived in New York, she was slipping in and out of mental illness. She surfaced triumphantly once during that period, publishing her only other book, Airless Spaces, a fictionalized account of her own grim experiences with hospitalization and the psychotropics that were the only thing standing between her and insanity. As part of a support group that met with Shuley every month for awhile in her psychiatrists office, I was one of many urging her to stay on those drugs. But in the end she couldnt. They stole too much of her soul. I shall remember Shuley as one of the luckiest women Ive knowngifted with a mind of searing intensity and brilliance, beautiful, and, when she was on, charming and funny in her sly way. But she was also the unluckiest, cursed with a mental illness that destroyed that mind and left her with no way out. As for us, weeven those of us who didnt appreciate her when she was with uswere lucky to have her. Beth Rashbaum

My dear friend Shulie was the best of conversationalists. She was always totally immersed in the topic at hand and focused on the person at the other end of the exchange. It mattered what we talked about, but what mattered more was how we talked. Because Shulie had an unerring ability to cut right to the chase, she was always a stimulating sparring partner. She astonished me with her flashes of originality, and she had many of these. She was never dogmatic, and always open to rebuttal. There was a fluidity to talking with her; it felt like a process of mutual searching, rather than just a simple exchange. It was delirious and exhausting, but always exciting. I had a feeling early in our friendship, around 1963 at the Art Institute of Chicago, that painting would not demand the greater part of Shulies attention. One day, in the school cafeteria, she asked me timidly if I would be interested in seeing some of her poetry, and I replied of course. I expected the kind of post-adolescent efforts that I had also engaged in (she was 18, and I was 23). What she presented me with were reams of pages written in a large bold hand, running uninterrupted across the pages, threatening to set the paper on fire. The thoughts were wild and apocalyptic, as Shulie herself was at that time. She was a triple incarnation of Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxembourg, and a bit of St. Francis thrown in for good measure. I dont believe she ever made these poems public. On one of my visits to New York to see Shulie, thirty years ago, she invited me to see a mural that she was in the process of completing. Because she was interested in all of the worlds

tragedies, Shulie had approached the Goethe-Institut of New York with an offer to paint a commemorative mural of the General Slocum Ferry Disaster of 1904. Over 1,000 recently arrived German immigrants, on a holiday outing on the East River, had drowned when the ferry caught fire and sank only thirty minutes out of the harbor. The Institut had accepted her offer and provided a schoolroom for her use as a makeshift studio. Besides this, they only paid for her materials. Shulie declined remuneration, as it was to be an act of gratuitous compassion for a bygone event. Shulie asked me to critique the mural, but with the caveat that if I thought the work bad, she would never paint again. I protested that she was putting me in an impossible situation. I considered her talented as a painter, and I would never lie to her. I said that I would rather not look at the work than risk her never painting again. She would not relent. She insisted that a friend was obliged to give an opinion regardless of the consequences. I gave in and went to see a large canvas, thirty feet wide and six feet high, tacked to a wall. I told her what I thought of it with great trepidation, watching as her face dropped and assumed a forlorn expression. She said she would attempt to finish it, but that she would make no further attempts at painting. I couldnt argue in the face of her stubborn decision. She followed her convictions to the bitter end; half measures were not a part of her repertoire. This was Shulie. Shulie was a talented portrait painter. We both admired German expressionists like Otto Dix, and there was a measure of their influence in her work. I still have a portrait that Shulie did around 1965 and gave to me, which I treasure. One thing about Shulie that many people dont know is that she became somewhat indifferent to the pressures of speaking about her days in the feminist movement. On one occasion, perhaps in the 80s, she accepted an invitation to speak at a university. While onstage she realized that the subject bored her to exasperation, and so she found herself drifting into a talk about Jewish mysticisma subject she was investigating at the time. The audience was appalled and she was gently escorted off of the stage. Regardless, she was paid! When she shared this story with me we both burst into hysterics. It was not that she had lost respect for the radical feminist movement; she simply didnt want to talk about it anymore. I remember when Shulie was fired from her last conventional job, at $6 an hour, on account of her illness. She had to survive somehow, and these speaking fees were a great help. Shulie had a strong spiritual inclination and on occasion she acted on it. I think her interest in politics had waned by her mid-thirties. By then she was reading a lot about Christian mysticism and the writings of one contemporary Swiss mystic in particular. She picked up and flew to Switzerland after contacting him, and lived with him and his family for a while. This turned out to be a great disappointment when the man approached her inappropriately. (He turned out to be a full-fledged fraud.) Reading and studying Jewish mysticism followed this period, and I think that was her last experiment with religion. I mention this because Shulies interests did not end with feminism or politics in general: she had made her contribution, and she had to go further. Shulie experienced disappointment, bitterness, and great sadness in her life, and not only because of an illness over which she had no power. When I last saw her, she confided matter-of-factly

that her mental state had long been flat on account of medicationand what infuriated her most was that it affected her ability to do creative work. The greater part of herthe part I most remember and treasurewas her enormous compassion for others, her simplicity, and her insatiable curiosity. And of course, the originality of her creativity. Andrew Klein

Today my sisters body was lowered into a deep mud hole. It was a simple affair. No fanfare, not even chairs or a tent to cover us from the sun. Just the deep trench, a pile of earth pierced by four shovels, and a few family members standing together sadly; women in long skirts, men in black hats and suits. And Shulamith herself, of course. First the men trudged her in from the hearse, reciting a Hebrew psalm in low tones, and pausing their procession the customary seven times to show reticence in this act of burial. Then, before placing her on the straps that would lower her into the earth, someone asked us, her three siblings: Do you want to ask her mechilah, forgiveness? This was when fifty years of primitive feelings and memories came roaring through me. We placed our six hands on her box and sobbed. To ask forgiveness? The very thought elicited a lifetime of failures (for there was no correct way to love this woman). Nevertheless, I asked Shulamiths forgiveness: for expecting this moment, for dreading it without preventing it, for not bearing her suffering, for betraying her again and again, for trying to make her fit into this world, for misinterpreting her, for oversimplifying her ideas, for pandering, for apologizing for her, for not living up to what she stood for, for forgetting her for months and even years at a time, for not breaking through to her, for not understanding her disease, for not understanding her brilliance. Would there ever be an end to my need of forgiveness? A small knife appeared. I saw my brothers lapel being cut and heard a loud rip as he pulled the fabric apart with force. I was next. No matter that I was wearing an Armani silk. No little black ribbons for these people; it was all or nothing. The knife approached and I did not demure. My collar was cut. I ripped it further, listening to the shrill rip that mimicked the wail within me. The men lowered the casket carefully into the earth. I peered down the deep hole. How remarkably austere it all was. The simple unvarnished box that held her remains was like something pulled out of an old studio warehouse; just like my sister, without faade or apology. Surprisingly, a paper label with her name on it had been stuck on the casket lid. As if to make no mistake that she was contained inside, I thought, lest she elude us, evade us, slip away from us one more time. But of course, she had slipped away, this time for good. The sound of dirt hitting hard on her casket brought me back. I grabbed a shovel.

I dont know how it works, whether our diseases fall away with our troubled bodies when they die. But I am counting on Shulamith finding herself again as her soul navigates its way into the upper chambers of this universe, her unobscured self, the one that might have flourished had she found enough understanding and love in this world: the wildly creative, overwhelmingly generous being, voracious for change, desperate for a redeemed feminine principle. When my turn came to say some words, a verse from Torah popped to mind. It felt too dark to speak aloud at that moment, but I see now that it has her name on it, just like the label on her box: Tov Shem mayshemen tov vyom hamavet miyom hivaldo. A good name is more precious than fine oil, and the day of ones death better than the day of ones birth. (Ecclesiastes 7:1) Shuley, you are finally released from this harsh world. Time for rest. It is due you. Tirzah Firestone

Part Two

Print

This is the second of two segments on Shulamith Firestone. Read the intro here, and Part One here. Almost fifteen years ago, I picked up my ringing phone and the voice on the other end identified herself as Shulamith Firestone. I almost dropped the receiver. When the call came I was in touch with many second-wave feminists, but no one knew how to reach Shulamith or anything about how she survived since decisively quitting the movement she helped launch. Not one to show up at Veteran Feminists of America gatherings or 92nd Street Y panels, she didnt appear to want to dine out on her past, or even preserve it. She was the rarest bird. That day in 1998 Firestone informed me she had written a small book of interconnected stories called Airless Spaces, her first published work after The Dialectic of Sex; she hoped that I could review it. You have to understand: meeting the women who created radical feminism felt like my lifes work. Alice Echolss 1989 Daring to Be Bad was my guidebook, alerting me to the conditions and personalities that led to the explosion of theory and action behind contemporary feminism. The out-of-the-blue call from Shulamith led to the two of us meeting. She lived, it turned out, just a few blocks from me in the East Village. She had short, brushed back hair, an open smile, and a short, trim body clad in jeans and sneakers. She wore a denim jacket and was fun and genuine. We had dinner, she came to an event I held in which second- and third-wave feminists read each others work, we grabbed beers at St. Dymphnas. During this time, I was lobbying to get Farrar, Straus & Giroux to reissue a series of Feminist Classics, and I wanted The Dialectic of Sex to be part of the series. I thought it was the most significant feminist book out of print. In it, Shulamith blasted the then-overriding assumption that men work and women live parasitically off of their labor by declaring that (male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity. Her thinking in that book was so bold, so devoid of accommodations to men or cultural constructs like romantic love or the beauty of childbearing, it was almost as if she werent part of reality. As it turned out, she wasnt firmly rooted in realityor any stability that could enable her to have peace of mind or meaningful community. When I met her, she was very vulnerable: poor, in and out of mental hospitals to deal with paranoia and other mental illness, living off of social security and almost never interacting with old friends. She mentioned a science fiction novel she was producing in a blaze of creativity during one visit (she had gone off her medication, which dulled her mind); the next time we met, she was bleak and had thrown all of the pages away, having shown it to someone (she didnt say who). According to Shulamith, this reader said she had somehow plagiarized the book. I never learned what had actually happened, but her demeanor was flat and she didnt want to write. The last time we met, in 2002, she told me that she wanted The Dialectic of Sex to be reissued as part of the Feminist Classics. I was ecstatic. A few years after the new edition was published, she demanded we take it out of print. We did and, other than occasionally seeing her sitting at the

coffee shop across from Tompkins Square Park, I never interacted with her again. I moved out of the neighborhood, had kids, published another Feminist Classic or two, but began focusing more on feminist peers and those in the next generation, replacing some of the ardency I had for radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. I opened Airless Spaces again today and found a note I had scribbled in the margin, a remnant of my 1998 thinking: One has no sense of how her feminist fame contributed to her demise . . . was it such a hard act to reprise? Was it the tight girdle of the Womens Liberation Movement identity? Backlash and conspiracy? When I wrote that, she was still alive and would be for many yearsbut, in a way, her demise was imminent. The liberated mind she used to so vividly imagine a feminist revolution lacked any tether to connect Shulamith to community, sanity, or life. Losing Shulamith Firestone chills me. Are her ideas sufficiently embodied in the DNA of the feminist movement? Will her contributions live on? I think so, and yet I wonder. The bold thinkers of the second wave, those rare birds, are scarce. Is it enough to read their books and know their history to keep them from extinction? Or is it necessary that we continue to uphold, as she did, a unique vision of the world? The confidence and presence of self it took for Shulamith to write her daring view of feminist revolution is one message of her lifeand its the one I choose to remember. Jennifer Baumgardner1

Some time in 1997, the artist Beth Stryker wrote me to ask if Semiotext(e) would like to consider a new work by Shulamith Firestone for our Native Agents series. My heart leapt. The timing seemed almost magical. For the last couple of years, Id been obsessed with researching the histories of second-wave feminist critics, artists, and writers. Id just published my first book and at the time, it seemed like the worthiest goal of any life was to appear. Where are they now? I wondered. The answers, as they arrived, formed a nauseous testament to the personal cost of American activism. Some had become New Age shamans and healers, living in tepees and tents in the Southwest. Some had been institutionalized. Some, when I managed to reach them, were impossibly bitter and cranky, having been backed so far into a corner they could no longer speak to the world. Others had simply stopped working and dropped off the cultural radar. Throughout this research, Id wondered what had become of Shulamith Firestone. The most intellectually brilliant and bold of her contemporaries, surely she hadnt succumbed to these disappointing conciliations. Published when she was 25 years old, Firestones Dialectic of Sex fused the dizzying extrapolationist logic of Solanass SCUM Manifesto with the analytical rigor of any great work of philosophy. When it arrived, Firestones manuscript seemed to answer the question. Airless Spaces is a series of pointed vignettes about the lives of the poor inside and outside public psychiatric institutions. And, I must confess, at that time I misread the book. Like the obituary writers who choose to memorialize Firestone through the lens of her mental illness, I found it heartbreaking proof of the isolation suffered by women pursuing ideas when they are no longer popular.

Shortly after Dialectic appeared, Firestone walked off the stage of professional feminism, an arena in which she could have pursued a distinguished career. Instead, she returned to her earlier work as a painter, which she continued even after the onset of schizophrenia in the late 1980s. During this time, her income and life were extremely marginal. The hospitalizations she describes in the book were confinements in public institutions, where the words treatment, activities, and community rightly appear in italics. Fifteen years later, Im struck less by the fact of Firestones deathfrankly, 67 is a ripe old age within the indigent, mentally ill populationthan by the books astonishing literary achievement. Far from a rehab or hospitalization memoir, Airless Spaces makes no mention at all of the authors diagnosis and treatment. Its first person merely observes, with impeccable, damning detail, the small and large acts of brutality imposed by the patients themselves and by the institution that must eventually culminate in the annihilation of personality and will. No one outside of this world could have written the book; no writer I know whos undergone the experience has ever described it with Firestones lucid sangfroid and dispassion. Airless Spaces is singular testament not only of madness, but of the psychic condition of poverty and all forms of institutionalization. The book is a miracle. Chris Kraus

I never met Shulamith Firestone, but Ive been immersed in a representation of her for seventeen years. While researching second-wave feminism in graduate school at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was shown a documentary portrait of her filmed when she was a student there in 1967. The 16mm film, titled Shulie, was produced by four Northwestern University graduate film students: Jerry Blumenthal, Sheppard Ferguson, James Leahy, and Alan Rettig. In it, Shulamith Firestone, 22, argues confidently for a life on the margins. Though it had been filmed almost thirty years before, she seemed eerily contemporary. The filmmakers document her waiting for the train, photographing trash and workers at a dump yard, painting a young mans portrait in her studio, working at the US Post Office, and enduring an excruciating painting critique before an all-male panel of professors. She discusses her views on art, religion, language, men, motherhood, and race. Because the filmmakers had a mandate to document the so-called Now Generation, questions about time, generations, and what constitutes the now recur throughout. The directors had no way of knowing that Firestone would go on to become a key figure in the Womens Liberation Movement and produce one of its most radical texts. Still, the seeds of her nascent feminist theories are embedded in the film. So too is her bold vision of how to live as an artist. Employing an intimate, lyrical, cinema verit approach, the directors successfully captured a young womans complexity and fervor during that critical historical moment. And while Firestone notably chose to withhold information about her political activities, its all there: the intensity, the irreverence, the challenges to religion and gender roles, and her self-described alienation. On camera she is intense, funny, flirtatious, ironic, driven, audacious, coy; an intellectual badass.

After watching Shulie so many times it should have staged a revolt in my VHS deck, I was given permission to work with the material. Obsessed with the ways the original film spoke to contemporary issues surrounding gender, representation, and the legacy of the 1960s, in 1997 I completed a Super 8 fictional adaptation. Also titled Shulie, it was a shot-by-shot remake with intentional deviations and slippage and an introductory section that sets up the film with contemporary footage. Using friends as actors and crew, I collaborated with the uncanny lookalike Kim Soss, who was also the production designer. One of the original directors, Jerry Blumenthalan award-winning filmmaker and producer, and co-founder of the acclaimed Kartemquin Filmsgenerously racked his brains to help me find the original locations and shared his memories of the original production. The completed project left me with questions that Ive wrestled with for many yearsquestions that have only intensified in light of Firestones recent death. Im often asked why I made the film, which I have written about in aesthetic and theoretical terms here. But what first compelled me was the chutzpah and spirit of this incredible woman, who went on to write not one but two books that unapologetically confront some of the most controversial, taboo subjects in our culture. She was just a kid when she began writing The Dialectic of Sex, a mature, brilliant work synthesizing the ideas of major philosophers, historians, sociologists, novelists, and public figures. Twenty-eight years later, in Airless Spaces, she took on the cruelest companions of an intense psychemental illness, poverty, and alienation. Both books are provocative and exposing, but in some ways, Airless Spaces is even more courageous in its utter refusal to insulate us from the hell of psychic disorder. As a graduate student and then an instructor at the Art Institute in the 90s, I was troubled by how Firestones experiences there reflected my own and those of my female students. The resonance seemed a sad testament to the work that remains unfinished today. Resurrecting that era across exactly thirty years of history felt like urgent and essential work. But after sending Firestone a rough cut of the film via her good friend Robert Roth, I learned that she didnt like it. Roth told me Firestone said that as an artist she appreciated it as a labor of love, but she hadnt liked the 1967 version and didnt see how mine was any different. Crushed and conflicted, I decided not to publicly screen the filmnot for legal or ethical reasons, but for emotional ones. Five months later, a mentor and feminist intellectual challenged my decision. She argued that we have a right in this culture to contemplate, cite, and respond to the ideas and representations of public figures without authorization. And that in the spirit of Firestones own revolutionary call to armsher argument that women must dare to be bad and resist the tyranny of nicenessI should share my own provocative work. In the spirit of Firestones incendiary writing and activism, I decided to show the film. Being, perhaps, an obedient bad girl, I allowed it to be screened only conditionally: in arts and educational contexts, with extensive educational materials, limited publicity, and strict presentation conditions; and whenever possible, with myself there to contextualize the project, especially in New York. Its complicated to address someones legacy when at times she no longer wants that recognition. And its a delicate decision to present someone in that moment of becoming. Firestone, by many accounts, saw herself first as an artist. While most artists dont suffer from mental illness, studies have shown how often the two go hand in hand. In the original Shulie, she expresses her passion

for her work with such an intense, almost hypo-manic fervor, perhaps a subtle indicator of things to come. Having explored mental illness in my own work, Im familiar with its vicissitudes and the ways such diseases can both illuminate and distort ones intellectual, emotional, and perceptual fields. One cannot help but wonder how that affected her feelings about her work and influence. One of the most enduring legacies of second wave feminism is its insistence on respecting multiple subjectivities. As Firestone and I never met, such an opportunity to hear each other was lost. Over the years, Firestones friends have reported her varying reactions towards the film, from begrudging approval to much distress. It is heartbreaking to contemplate that a reverent film that reignited interest in her work would have caused her pain, and for that Im deeply sorry. Now Ive been asked to both show the film in her honor and to withhold it in her honor. Once again, the dilemma: which Shulamith Firestone do we honor? Theres the artist, the trailblazing activist, and the writer of important, provocative books; theres the author who alternately allowed and withdrew those books from publication; and theres the woman who suffered from mental illness. Was her withdrawal from the life of the public intellectual another prescient and willful insight? Or in complying with her (occasional) wishes, thus letting her ideas become less accessible to new generations of readers, are we ultimately responsible for allowing another brilliant womans voice to be slowly erased from history? I asked myself these questions every time I showed my film. When I was told about her death, I pulled the film from distribution. As we mourn Firestones untimely death, we should honor the actual womans legacy, not a fictionalized conceptual art project. A few weeks ago, the feminist writer Jennifer Baumgardner, who made rigorous efforts to republish The Dialectic of Sex, told me that in her conversations with Shulamith she seemed neutral about my film but felt I hadnt captured her spark. Clearly her objections were stronger at times, but I love that she still knew this about herself. Shulamith Firestone was completely out there. She was on fire. And that passionate flame is irreducible, and irreproducible. Elisabeth Subrin

I never met her. I never even spoke to her. By the time I first wrote about Shulamith Firestone, in 1989, in the context of the history of womens liberation, her brilliant, offbeat book The Dialectic of Sex was almost twenty years old and she had been absent from the womens movement for just as long. In the years that marked the fading of feminism and the appearance of post-feminism, Firestone wasnt heard from in any way that brought her public attention, except for the very occasional letter to the editor. Almost twenty years ago I wrote about The Dialectic of Sex again, this time on the occasion of its re-publication. I compared Firestone to Patti Smith, at that point still in retirement. The spiky, fearless, whip-smart Firestone seemed to me to share something with Smith, who, as Sandra Bernhard memorably remarked, saw so far into the future she could afford to take ten years off

and not say another word. My essay appeared in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and some part of me probably hoped that Firestone, buoyed by Dialectics re-appearance and appreciative reviews, might write again. She did, but not about feminism. Her book of stories, Airless Spaces, which appeared in 1998, instead drew on her experiences in psychiatric hospitals. I cannot speak to Firestones decision to drop out and fade away from the womens liberation movement. But I can discuss, very briefly, Firestones Dialectic. It was a polarizing text, one that upon publication was praised and vilified. Firestone, impatient with any version of feminism that refused to dig deep to understand womens own investment in business as usual, believed that women had to un-learn habituated niceness, to dare to be bad. Tellingly, her dream feminist protest was a smile boycott. While it did not lack humor, Dialectic was a smile boycott on a grand scale. Whatever she was like as a person, as the author of Dialectic Firestone refused to be judicious, apologetic, modest, or coy. For me, the books appeal had as much to do with her assumption that she could take on that eras big gunsMarx and Freudas anything else. As for Firestones analysis of male dominance, many feminists took issue with her insistence that its roots lay in the natural reproductive differences between the sexes, and its solution lay in society getting rid of nature through cybernation. Although Dialectic had its defenders, over the years it became feminisms favorite whipping girl. The book would stand accused of multiple sins, but two stood out: it revealed an author who was male-identified (she favored socialism, technology, and polymorphous sexuality), and the utopia it advanced was really a cybernetic Brave New World. Firestone anticipated many of the criticisms against her, including the charge one that resonated across feminisms political spectrumthat she wanted to transform women into men. Her point, she argued, wasnt to draft women into a male world but rather to eliminate the gender distinction altogether. Today, Firestones conviction that getting rid of nature is the way forward is the stuff of gender studies classes everywhere. Indeed, before Donna Haraway declared her preference for the cyborg over the goddess or Judith Butler began troubling gender, there was Firestone, and, before her, of course, the woman who helped inspire Dialectic, Simone de Beauvoir. Ive been teaching Dialectic regularly for about eight years in a class on the history of US feminism, and it continues to sizzleto outrage and inspire. If the book confirms the view that the second wave trafficked in false universalism at its own significant peril, it also goes some way toward changing other prevalent notions about womens liberation. Readers can see for themselves that Firestones radical feminism is inclusive of socialism, and unapologetic about heterosexuality. For me . . . I will always wonder in what ways feminism might be different had Firestone not disappeared. Alice Echols

1970 seems a long time ago for those of us not yet born, and possibly even for those who were. Shulamith Firestones Dialectic of Sex, which appeared that year alongside Kate Milletts Sexual Politics, is nevertheless filled with the promise of the future. It envisions a world in which the id can live free and technology finally releases women from the burden of their biology,

eliminating forever the fundamental inequality of the sexes. Nature may have produced the fundamental inequality, but widespread application of reproductive technologies will, Firestone claimed, release women from the dangers of childbirth, destroy the family once and for all, and herald a new era of total political and sexual equality. As a vision of the human emancipation, Firestones brief tract is unparalleled, for better or worse. Her materialist view of history based on sex itself sought to go further than Marx and Engelsto seize the means not only of production but also of reproduction. Firestone today seems unusual, and controversial for taking the position that sex difference is a question of biological difference, not social construction, and for her claim that female biology is fundamentally nightmarish. (Anyone who has experienced an ecstatic birth or is indifferent to menstruation will find Firestones claim that women are at the continual mercy of their biology and that pregnancy is barbaric bemusing). Rather than suggesting a revaluation of cultural valuesfor example, challenging the notion that pregnancy is akin to an illness and undermining the idea that women are weaker, Firestone takes negative assumptions about female biology all the way to their conclusion: history has treated women poorly precisely because of their biology, or at least their biology has been used as an excuse to generate oppression and social imbalance. Sex difference, she argues, is at the root of all other inequalities: the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labor at the origins of class. But with the advent of birth control and the possibility of so many more reproductive (or cybernetic) technologies, Firestone believed this historical excuse for female oppression would soon no longer be relevant. Firestones turbo-Enlightenment approach to the emancipatory dimensions of these technologies was prescient but ultimately incomplete. The technologies that Firestone celebrated and predictedIVF treatment, wide access to contraception and abortion, test-tube technologyare here, at least in richer parts of the world, but their effects on the structures of the family have been negligible, or at least nowhere near as revolutionary as Firestone predicted. IVF treatment, which in most cases is extremely expensive, is still seen as an alternative to natural childbirth, as opposed to its replacement, and while birth control has undoubtedly revolutionized the ways in which women live and work, it hasnt shattered the existing order or ushered in a new era of widespread genderless pan-sexuality (unfortunately, perhaps). For me, Firestone deserves to be read alongside the feminist science fiction of the 1970sMarge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuinwhich is similarly imaginative and equally radical. Not because Firestones arguments are somehow utopian, impossible, or idealistic: on the contrary, they are radically materialist and remain relevant, despite some dubious and dated dimensions (Firestones comments on race in Dialectic of Sex came in for heavy criticism from Angela Davis, among others). What Firestone shares with these other visionary writers is the belief that anything is possible in this brave new world, and that the old patriarchal, biological, social, and political tyrannies could, and would, be overturned, and quickly at that. The cyber-feminism that re-emerged in the 1990s with the advent of the internet owed much to Firestones techno-positive approacheven if the theoretical terrain shifted from the fleshly to the virtual. We are accustomed to regarding pronouncements such as Firestones with a kind of world-weary sigh-smile: Well it wasnt to be, was it? Perhaps it wasnt, but as an attempt to imagine things

otherwise, it remains mind-altering. If there were, Firestone says of her project, a word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it. We may still be waiting for that word, but Firestone need wait no longer. Nina Power

Shulamith Firestone is best known for her visions for feminisms future, but she also wrote a lot about feminisms past. Even in 1968, this was a history that needed redeeming. What does the word feminism bring to mind? Firestone wrote in her contribution to Notes from the First Year. Chances are that whatever image you have, it is a negative one. In her writings on the origins of feminism, Firestone insisted on the movements dynamite revolutionary potential, describing how its attacks on the law and the church shook the foundations of the patriarchy even more than those early agitators realized. But she also faulted the movements concessions for feminisms subsequent dormancy and the false sense of emancipation that followed the vote. Without knowledge of feminisms real radical history, women had no choice but to try to content themselves with what seemed like freedom. The smear tactic . . . combined with a blackout of feminist history to keep women hysterically circling through a maze of false solutions. It is this analysis of feminisms demise that led to her own radical strain of thought, direct and uncompromising. I read Dialectic of Sex at the beginning of my senior year of college, and its not an exaggeration to say that the book changed the way I live my life. More than just the force of so many of Firestones specific argumentsher chapters on love anticipate Laura Kipnis; her section on male culture would be a good antidote to conversations about the fate of women novelistsI was staggered by her faith in feminisms potential to fight beyond equality per se and toward individual freedom. Before I read Firestone, I didnt know that you could question things like the family or romance. I didnt know that kind of thinking was even possible. Feminism has a cyclical momentum, Firestone wrote. Its now been almost fifty years since the beginnings of the second wave, the same amount of time Firestone calculated between the end of the first wave and the beginnings of her own movement. May young women in search of new ways to be set aside their Joan Didion and Naomi Wolf and pick up Dialectic of Sex instead. Madeleine Schwartz

I somehow managed to get pregnant and have a child without ever having read The Dialectic of Sex. (Or, considering Shulamith Firestones emphatic views on the subject, I suppose she might say that I managed to get pregnant and have a child precisely because I had never read her book.) Id first heard of her when I was in college; her memorable name for many years would bring to mind nothing more than vague notions of cyborg wombs. The Womens Movement, Joan Didions withering assessment of 70s feminism, reserved particular scorn for Firestones

proposal to transcend, via technology, the very organization of nature. Reading Didions piece in my early twenties, I felt like my reflexive suspicions of a certain strand of radical feminism had been confirmed. Joan Didion sounded reasonable to me. Shulamith Firestone, in her rendition, did not. I recall my early response to that essaywhole-hearted agreement, an almost sensual pleasure in reading a woman writer skewer the womens movement with such clinical efficiencyand recognize that I was working through some issues of my own at the time. I might have called myself a feminist, but not without some awkward attempts to distance myself from a radical feminism that always sounded either too angry or too idealistic to my ear. I had an almost pathological aversion to sentimentality in any form. Didion was my kind of writer. In fact, she still is. But that doesnt mean that I can continue to deny how completely her contempt in that essay seems to miss the point. The Dialectic of Sex is an utterly unreasonable work of historical inquiry, philosophical reverie, and sci-fi speculation. Firestones take on pregnancy (barbaric the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species) and educating a child (retarding his development) reflect what seems to be a weird combination of techno-optimism and biological essentialism. Trying to untangle yourself from the thicket is an impossible task. Nature demands that women have babies, but they shouldnt; nature demands that children be free of adult supervision, and they should. According to Firestone, a pregnant woman provokes revulsion among everyone, including the pregnant woman herself, and Firestone insists we should pay attention: The childs first response, Whats wrong with that Fat Lady?; the husbands guilty waning of sexual desire; the womans tears in front of the mirror at eight monthsare all gut reactions, not to be dismissed as cultural habits. Its worth noting, however, that these kinds of outrageous pronouncementswhich are of course the ones that made her both revered and reviledare the least interesting parts of The Dialectic of Sex. Woven throughout the book are some acute and altogether searing observations on some of the complicated cultural conditions women faced then, and continue to face now: This image of the supposedly liberated woman went around the world via Hollywood, the unbalancing effects on women of pseudo-liberation giving antifeminists new ammunition. For the Left Brotherhood have been quick to jump in to see what they could co-optcoming up with a statement against monogamy, at which clear sign of male-at-work, feminists could only laugh bitterly. To Firestone, an attack like Didions must have seemed like a prophecy fulfilled: In a male-run society that defines women as an inferior and parasitical class, a woman who does not achieve male approval in some form is doomed. . . . Thus the particular situation that women never object to the insulting of women as a class, as long as they are individually excepted. The worst insult for a woman is that she is just like a woman, i.e. no better; the highest compliment that she has the brains, talent, dignity, or strength of a man. In fact, like every member of an

oppressed class, she herself participates in the insulting of others like herself, hoping to thereby make it obvious that she as an individual is above their behavior. And as an artist herself, Firestone had much to say about the plight of the woman artist trying to be taken seriously in a culture that was defined in terms that arent her own: For a woman who participates in (male) culture must achieve and be rated by standards of a tradition she had no part in makingand certainly there is no room in that tradition for a female view, even if she could discover what it was. In those cases where a woman, tired of losing at a male game, has attempted to participate in culture in a female way, she has been put down and misunderstood, named by the (male) cultural establishment Lady Artist, i.e. trivial, inferior. And even where it must be (grudgingly) admitted she is good, it is fashionablea cheap way to indicate ones own seriousness and refinement of tasteto insinuate that she is good but irrelevant. There is something bracinglyas well as distressinglycontemporary in Firestones insights; we might have come a long way from the 1950s fantasy of the aproned hausfrau that had incited much of Firestones ire, but when I first picked up Dialectic not long ago I expected a treatise about bionic reproduction and got this commentary on the dark side of sexual revolution instead: Emancipated women were imitating [men]. And they had inoculated themselves with a sickness that had not even sprung from their own psyches. They found that their new cool was shallow and meaningless, that their emotions were drying up behind it, that they were aging and becoming decadent: they feared they were losing their ability to love. You dont even have to agree with what shes saying to marvel at the mind at work here. Firestone, who elsewhere in The Dialectic writes hopefully of true love and pansexuality, can sometimes sound like a brilliant contradiction in terms: an anti-misogynist Michel Houellebecq. (The fact that I made the comparison perhaps argues Firestones point: What does it say when we associate certain ideas with a louche male novelist rather than the female artist who was struggling with those same ideas thirty years prior?) Firestones desire to eliminate biological differences between the sexes might have been absurd, but it isnt that much more fanciful than the very public musings of a former State Department official who found it shocking that she couldnt live in DC and also make it home to Princeton in time for family dinners. One woman wanted to transcend the laws of biology, the other the laws of physics. But Im going to step away from the edge of false equivalence. Given the tepid punditry that seems to pass for a national conversation about women at the moment, Ill take the doomed commitments of Shulamith Firestone any day. Jennifer Szalai