JOHN G. writes:

Thank you for posting the link recently to the article by Susan Faludi on “The Madness of Shulamith Firestone.” Although painful reading, it was very informative. As you said, it is startling to realize how the most radical of the feminists has seen her vision of an androgynous “Brave New World” realized.

What was also most telling about the piece was the fact that Firestone’s life — as miserable and futile and excruciating as it was — actually was typical of what happened to so many other feminist leaders. By their own admission, many of them suffered from similar sorts of psychoses. At a memorial service, the very famous feminist pioneer Kate Millet read a passage from Firestone’s memoir of her descent into madness:

She could not read. She could not write. . . . She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.

And Millet concluded, ““I think we should remember Shulie, because we are in the same place now.”

The article details the viciousness of the feminist movement, and the way in which every woman who took a leading role was immediately attacked by a mob of envious fellow women. The thematic center might be the cliche which the article says has become one of the most quoted lines of the feminist movement, “Sisterhood is powerful. It kills … [mostly] sisters.”

Which would not be a surprise to students of the French Revolution who know that “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children.”

I don’t know whether Goya’s depiction of this saying is too gory for your website, but I think it is not too extreme in its depiction of the violence both physical and psychic which the revolutionaries not only inflict on their victims, but from which they all eventually suffer themselves.

Thanks for all your great work.

Please keep up the fight.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

— Comments —

Sage McLaughlin writes:

If Goya’s stark, terrifying vision is too much for some readers, nature provides as good a demonstration in the planet Saturn itself:

Did you know that there is a standing theory that the rings of Saturn were formed in large part from one or more of the planet’s moons?  That is, Saturn has “devoured its children” by drawing it (or them) closer and closer, eventually ripping them to pieces with the force of its gravitational field, creating the stunning rings we see today.  I have always been astonished that the ancients, in the absence of any clear images or detailed scientific knowledge of the gas giant, nonetheless identified it with the patricidal god.  At any rate, the image of the singular, all-devouring, all-consuming force that annihilates anything drawn into its orbit seems to be to be the ideal natural metaphor for feminism.  The historical record of the feminists who worship at the altar of revolution is one of dismembered souls and annihilated selves.

Laura writes:

That would be a great logo for an anti-feminist group.

Please follow and like us: