IN August, 2012, the feminist revolutionary Shulamith Firestone, who had been psychotic off and on for many years, was found dead in her New York apartment at the age of 67. An autopsy was never done, but she probably died of starvation. It was the lonely end of a once brilliant career. Firestone’s famous 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, envisioned a utopian world in which the biological family is replaced by “households” of free love and absolute individual autonomy. It is still considered a feminist classic. Raised an Orthodox Jew in a family of six children, Firestone had the characteristic father-hatred of atheistic, intellectual Jewish women. She hated the family — both the idea and the reality — with a burning passion, admired Marx and Engels and believed men were incapable of love.

In many ways, as this May article in The New Yorker by the feminist author Susan Faludi suggests, Firestone was prophetic. Her predictions of a depersonalized, androgynous society, a world in which children are sexualized and disconnected from their biological parents, have been at least partly realized. Ironically, Firestone, who never married or had children, encountered abysmal disappointment in her relations with other feminists, who turned out to be not such wonderful surrogate sisters. In the end, it was a biological relationship — her connection with her sister Laya — which provided her with the most sustaining comfort in life. There is a heartbreaking moment in Faludi’s article in which Laya tries to make contact with her demented sister and walks by her apartment while talking to her on the phone. She asks her sister to look out the window, but she refuses. The suicide of Firestone’s brother, Daniel, helped push her into madness, Laya said. Firestone believed all abiding love was a form of madness so it is not surprising she went insane.

I highly recommend Faludi’s piece, as disturbing as it is. It’s the story of a feminine Nietzsche (without the literary brilliance), a woman searching for transcendence in a creed without transcendence. Firestone is always referred to as a “radical feminist.” But the truth is she was just a feminist who articulated the radical implications of all feminism. Not everyone lives those radical implications, but nevertheless they are there. In that sense, Firestone was a truth teller. Even the most moderate of feminists contend that a male conspiracy against women has historically defined Western civilization. If this conspiracy existed and was so powerful that women were kept from fulfilling themselves then men are indeed incapable of love, in which case the dependence of women is just a form of slavery, as Firestone argued. Interestingly, Firestone’s feminism was energized by the rudeness and coarse behavior of male leftists in the 1960s, who didn’t have much respect for their promiscuous partners.

— Comments —

Alex writes:

You write: “Firestone believed all abiding love was a form of madness so it is not surprising she went insane.”

There is another possibility: Firestone was insane so it is not surprising she believed all abiding love was a form of madness.

Laura writes:

Yes, it is hard to know whether her insanity was caused by her ideas or her ideas were caused by her insanity. But we can confidently conclude that they were related. Faludi suggests that her madness is the result of her “political vision.”

Andy K. writes:

When I saw that photo of Firestone, I had an instant and rather unpleasant flashback from where I first saw it. It was on the back cover of her book The Dialectic of Sex, which was on my reading list in our sex roles Sociology course at SUNY Oswego in 1978. The face of insanity indeed!

Needless to say the course was taught by the Dept.’s top radical feminist, a woman then in her 50’s who came from Ireland. She knew that Firestone’s book would be too radical for our class, so she tried to push a form of Feminism Light on us, namely Androgyny. (She actually had a rather pleasant personality and lecturing style, she was good at sugar-coating her radical side!).

Her main argument was that traditional sex roles were “socially constructed,” and that they were too rigid, and only by embracing Androgyny could we be “fully human.” She would also say that the individual, rather than the traditional family, should be the basis of our post-industrial society, and that marriage was only one form of the many types of “intimate friendships” we could choose for ourselves. Looking at today’s high divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates, I guess she got her wish. I shudder to think of what must be taught in a course like this nowadays.

Laura writes:

This painting by Degas, Tête de Jeune Femme, is on the cover of the paperback Bantam edition of the book. It’s a clever choice by the publisher. The woman in the painting is relatively beautiful.

Rose H. writes:

After recounting the abusive and neglectful treatment by Karl Marx of his wife and mistress, Ann Coulter observed “No wonder feminists think all men are pigs.Their men are pigs.”

Laura writes:

Exactly.

In light of the fact that the nihilistic, atheistic trend of Western Civilization for at least the last two hundred years was producing a significant number of rotten men, feminism is easier to comprehend.

Bill R. writes:

You write of “a woman searching for transcendence in a creed without transcendence.” So well put! Is not that indeed the tragic essence of all liberalism? I would add that even that description could only be reserved for their sincerest seekers. And as historian Paul Johnson showed in his book Intellectuals, nowhere is the bankruptcy and degeneracy-inspiring quality of liberal thought more in evidence than when its practitioners attempt to realize it in their personal lives. The more practically-minded among them, of course, solve the problem by simple resort to hypocrisy: That’s the wealthy, liberal big-newspaper journalist you see on a Sunday talk show who argues for the moral superiority of integrated schools while sending his own children to an all-white private one.

Laura writes:

It’s no better than a drunk who seeks oblivion in a bottle.

Bill R. writes:

In the picture you have, she’s not bad looking but her expression is quintessentially that of the heartless totalitarian, a modern, would-be Madame Defarge except that her revolution never came off — at least not her lifetime.

Mary writes:

I don’t see heartlessness in Firestone’s picture. I see emptiness, a void, a nothingness. She spent her early years trying to obviate the supremacy of the natural family and of blood ties. She went mad in the process. In clinging to her real sister as her “only true sister, after all,” and in disowning both her parents, she gave validity to the very truths she sought to destroy.

I see her as a brilliant young woman filled with rage and sorrow, an uncontrolled and misdirected choleric who was radicalized by the toxic mix of a poor home life and association with those who would egg her on just to experience vicariously her brand of feminist audacity. Her ideas were diabolical and her descent into madness is unsurprising.