Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone’s visionary first book The Dialectic of Sex dared to look at how feminism could shape the future. Finding herself drifting into a new ‘airless space’ after her experience of New York City radical feminist groups, Firestone wrote her first work of fiction. Airless Spaces portrays the psychic suffering, bureaucratized poverty and small crises of everyday life. In a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces follows characters in psychiatric wards and out in the streets of New York City to move beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional spaces to record acts of cruelty and kindness. With an accompanying Reader featuring contributions by Laya Seghi, Lourdes Cintron, Susan Faludi, Chris Kraus, Lola Olufemi and Hannah Proctor.

Short stories set among the disappeared and darkened sectors of New York City, about characters who fall prey to an increasingly bureaucratized poverty. After they raised her dose to 42 mg. of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died ... But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness, she felt an overwhelming relief. The black velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, black out, and never wake up again ... Shulamith Firestone was twenty-five years old when she published The Dialectic of Sex, her classic and groundbreaking manifesto of radical feminism, in 1970. Disillusioned and burned out by the fragmented infighting within the New York City radical feminist groups she'd helped to found, when her book hit the bestseller lists, Firestone decided against pursuing a career as a "professional feminist." Instead, she returned to making visual art, the profession that she'd trained for. She wouldn't publish anything again until Airless Spaces, in 1998. Long before her first hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia in 1987, Firestone had fallen off the grid and into precarity and poverty. For the next decade, she would move in and out of public psychiatric wards and institutions. Conceived as a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces is a subtle and deeply literary work. Embedded as a participant-observer, Firestone moves beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional life to record individual lives and acts of cruelty and kindness. The existence that she depicts is a microcosm of the world beyond.

"No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory second-wave landmark." --Naomi Wolf Originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, and going on to become a bestseller, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women's liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics. Beginning with a look at the radical and grassroots history of the first wave (with its foundation in the abolition movement of the time), Firestone documents its major victory, the granting of the vote to women in 1920, and the fifty years of ridicule that followed. She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproduction--for as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal. In the wake of recent headlines bemoaning women's squandered fertility and the ongoing debate over the appropriate role of genetics in the future of humanity, The Dialectic of Sex is revealed as remarkably relevant to today's society--a testament to Shulamith Firestone's startlingly prescient vision. Firestone died in 2012, but her ideas live on through this extraordinary book.