Shulamith Firestone's reissued The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
Snitow, Ann
THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST REVOLUTION, by Shulamith Firestone. William Morrow, 1970. (Reissued in 1993.) 224 pp. $10.00, paper. Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The...
...Certainly Firestone's text is vulnerable to such criticisms...
...So, sex, yes...
...The prose bops along, with its summings-up of the little gender knots of daily life...
...But this is to read the text out of its time...
...the way we live is intolerable, Then they stagger off, leaving the FALL • 1994 • 557 less moonstruck but considerably brightened to try to live the insight out...
...The ambition of the text has certainly been counted as one of its offenses: "Who does this little girl think she is...
...I took it and am eternally grateful to her...
...Her analysis of women's daily experience—in love, in sex, in (mostly repressed) world-building —is as fresh and right as it seemed then...
...Just what was it about the women's liberation movement that so took the culture by storm that—with whatever shortcomings, whatever waterings-down—it still has the power to interpret experience for millions...
...Typically, the protean Firestone is here the 558 • DISSENT first essentialist feminist and the first social constructionist...
...For readers of whatever generation who have been following the feminist story line, the book's precocity gives little gooses of surprise...
...This gut reaction—the assumption that, even when they don't know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition—is an honest one...
...560 • DISSENT...
...Finally, though, there's always a trick...
...Biology-as-destiny was their past, but not their future...
...But at the same time they are expected to express their individuality through their physical appearance...
...An attack on them can be confused with an attack on beauty itself...
...Even in 1970, I seem to have felt the scary undertow of this all-encompassing wave...
...Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution has been reissued, after many mysterious years out of print...
...Those who came after have had to work at a slower pace, to take greater care...
...Yet at some moments, The Dialectic of Sex wears the unassuming disguise of a mere advice book...
...Feminism by its very nature demands such basic changes that none of its work would make much sense without an Enlightenment confidence in progress, without a belief in the human capacity to give conscious shape to ourselves...
...For a new generation of readers, Firestone is movement history...
...In the interval between my two readings, The Dialectic of Sex has remained famous—either for being radical or being outrageous—depending on who is (half) remembering it...
...is the closest to the truth...
...A decade ago, the sixties were under vicious attack and even the most committed sixties people felt bitten, no longer in tune with sixties ardor...
...They want babies from test tubes...
...Even with hindsight I find it hard to sort out my feelings about movement hopefulness in general...
...Eroticism is exciting...
...They refuse to be mothers...
...No one wants to get rid of it...
...I regret to say this part of her work hasn't dated at all: The sex privatization of women is the process whereby women are blinded to their generality as a class which renders them invisible as individuals to the male eye...
...When women begin to look more and more alike, distinguished only by the degree to which they differ from a paper ideal, they can be more easily stereotyped as a class: they look alike, they think alike, and even worse, they are so stupid they believe they are not alike...
...Once again, I find it remarkable...
...If they don't the penalties are enormous: their social legitimacy is at stake...
...an end to the boundary of gender altogether, yes—and to all boundaries...
...She introduces almost the entire spectrum of subsequent movement interests in one big bang...
...When one remembers that the feminist bookshelf wasn't a foot long in 1970, the fullness, clarity and force of Firestone's feminism is simply amazing...
...When we demand the elimination of eroticism, we mean not the elimination of sexual joy and excitement but its rediffusion over—there's plenty to go around, it increases with use—the spectrum of our lives...
...That's just the point...
...Ironically enough, though feminist theory has moved steadily away from such biological determinism, feminists now have much lower expectations than Firestone's for the dissolving of "differences" like gender or race...
...is momentarily heard...
...And move over Donna Haraway on cyborgs: " .. . to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case...
...Why has all joy and excitement been concentrated, driven into one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience, and all the rest laid waste...
...They wanted babies from test tubes...
...In fact, the more conscious we become, the more lonely and naked we are in the middle of what we now understand to be an unfriendly situation...
...For those who remain feminist activists, these doubts are now baggage, the necessary, the useful impediments one carries with one on long journeys...
...Many feminist scholars and activists of a certain age have had their long, second thoughts, have put in their time in the necessary work of refining, revising, glossing, and pruning feminism, and may be interested in going to the well again to feel what that first energy was like...
...Our time is different, but this very fact is relevant evidence of the relentlessness and promise of change...
...Her bold voice and sailing pace seem at odds with the enormity and difficulty of the change she is seeking...
...then she goes on to make a chart of the great rolling dialectic of history from nomads to the disappearance of "culture" as we know it and the "realization of the conceivable in the actual...
...Today the library shelves are stuffed with feminist books on childhood and with feminist utopias old and new—and all in print...
...These days, difference is either tolerated or valued as an axiom of political life...
...Unfriendly situation...
...Thus women become more and more look-alike...
...we no longer believe in rose gardens...
...But the wheel has turned again, and The Dialectic of Sex will now be exciting to a number of different sorts of readers...
...she compares the oppression of women and children (and finds them deeply analogous...
...It converses respectfully with Marx and Freud, and its hero is Simone de Beauvoir...
...Feminists need not get so pious in their efforts that they feel they must flatly deny the beauty of the face on the cover of Vogue...
...I miss Firestone's avid joy, but I accept its absence as one by-product of the movement's longevity...
...The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance...
...Because of the bad, paperhoarding habits of a lifetime I still have that review — which, alas, includes no mention that was then closely acquainted with the author...
...From the first, it was demonized for some of its epigrams ("pregnancy is barbaric") or for some of its speculative practical suggestions (children should be raised by groups bound by seven- to ten-year contracts because the family, like a genetic code, reproduces the domination of men over women and children...
...women's movement was about three...
...Certainly a movement that was changing, testing its basic propositions, settling down for what looks like a long haul has used the book to measure distances: "Firestone promised us a rose garden...
...A]ll relationships would be based on love alone, uncorrupted by dependencies and resulting class inequalities...
...It is a love letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony FALL • 1994 • 559 (in 1970, lost to history or scorned...
...Sex objects are beautiful...
...For example, who remembers that John Berger's Ways of Seeing is fully anticipated in Firestone's dazzling chapter on culture...
...The dynamism of Marxism, the flowing sixties atmosphere, and the general tendency of feminist utopians to dream of amniotic bliss— all meet in The Dialectic of Sex...
...beauty, yes...
...look how far we have come...
...This was then...
...She points out the limitations of Marx and Freud...
...Good luck," I find myself thinking, but could this sarcasm be one symptom of the post-sixties taboo on mentioning such far-off desires, such confident demands for structural transformation...
...For this is not the point...
...freedom, yes...
...We are allergic to utopia just now, often seeing any sweeping prefigurative thinking as falsely universalizing, naive, out of touch with the hardness of power...
...For those who are re-reading, this is a period of memories and memoirs...
...Her true genre is Utopia: "[Tin our new society, humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality...
...They didn't like mothers...
...She is like a wonderful child who wants the moon, something big, bright, and at a distance she's not concerned to estimate...
...The book is full of wishful fusions between contradictory concepts...
...The real question is: is the face beautiful in a human way—does it allow for growth and flux and decay, does it express negative as well as positive emotions . . . ? To attack eroticism creates similar problems...
...To re-experience this unapologetic voice now is tonic...
...Women everywhere rush to squeeze into the glass slipper, forcing and mutilating their bodies with diets and beauty programs, clothes and makeup, anything to become the punk prince's dream girl...
...She sought what roots she could find, and overnight she produced sturdy, waving green branches...
...It was written twenty-five years ago, when the author was twenty-five and the modem U.S...
...Why you can't change that...
...Thus they are kept coming and going, at one and the same time trying to express their similarity and their uniqueness...
...political," is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them...
...During the backlash years, conservatives used the book as a convenient proof of the dangerous madness of feminist desires...
...Ann Landers from Hell, she makes mincemeat of the very concept "advice...
...The pace at which modern Western societies seemed to be moving, the expansion of possibilities from the 1950s to the 1970s, lifted what Firestone saw as the heavy burden of biology off many women in the West...
...You must be out of your mind...
...For example, it begins: Sex class is so deep as to be invisible...
...Contemporary feminists tend to be skeptical about the end of "otheting...
...A hundred articles and books have since sorted through these painful paradoxes, major sources of female self-loathing, but here they are, in a witty, full-blown description on Day One...
...But they have no choice...
...In those "Years," which have attracted metaphors like "explosion" and "revolution" and my own favorite, "mushroom effect," I didn't know the rules, so I reviewed The Dialectic of Sex on Nanette Rainone's WBAI radio show, "Womankind," even though I was in Firestone's women's group at the time, the "Stanton-Anthony Brigade" of New York Radical Feminists...
...It's touching to see that her only source on childhood is the admirable Philippe Aries and that she thinks there is no tradition of women's utopias...
...instead of the bromide that usually follows this now familiar kind of popularization, Firestone ends her snappy accounts of sexism with this warning: there is no private solution, dear reader, no short-term fix...
...She felt she could have it both ways, could claim the body as cause, as female prison, then could break the locks through social transformation...
...This sort of person appears (is created...
...My hopes to discover either prescience or idiocy (which I planned, of course, with hindsight to forgive myself) have both been disappointed on re-reading this handwritten souvenir of 1970...
...In an unequivocal voice now rare, Firestone simply insists that only fundamental reordering will change women's unfriendly situation, and that parts of that restructuring are currently imaginable in the West, while other parts are still only dreams...
...Or her grand gestures, which clear families, races, classes from the board of history, can be dismissed as totalitarian...
...She was a great leader partly because she eschewed such hedging...
...During those same years, some feminists used the book to show how short-sighted, overweening, or half-baked the early women's movement had sometimes been...
...The risks she took opened a path...
...she anatomizes the inner, often gendered dynamics of race and class...
...But this conflict itself has an important political function...
...This sort of mournful irony, this shy understatement of male intransigence is so far from Shulie's tone...
...At that inspired moment, opposites—and barriers— seemed about to dissolve...
...That so profound a change cannot be easily fitted into traditional categories of thought, e.g...
...It honors its dead and refuses the obfuscations of revisionists...
...o w is a particularly good time to read or re-read The Dialectic of Sex...
...It can easily be dismissed as marginal ("cybernetic communism," ha, ha...
...Like Haraway, Firestone would rather be a cyborg than a goddess...
...We police ourselves and each other more, while Firestone was shamelessly willing to generalize, speculate, make mistakes...
...Indeed, for a text so famous for its iconoclasm, the book devotes a lot of loving attention to the masters and the past...
...We are talking about something every bit as deep as that...
...Firestone was there from the beginning, first in Chicago SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), defying sexist catcalls from New Left men, then in New York, co-founding Redstockings and New York Radical Feminists, and co-editing the early, hot publishing ventures of the movement, Notes from the First Year (then the Second and Third Year...
...Magnificent and stunned by insight, they tell us we must change our lives...
...If her reading of Freud has been outdistanced, it is a pleasure to find here the still durable historical point that "Freudianism and feminism are made of the same stuff...
...T]he 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value...
...Young readers will sometimes think, "I already know this," then with some historical sense will, I hope, shake themselves and register that in 1970 no one knew any of it, even though it was all always already there to know...
...Firestone criticizes the false eroticism of this essentially bleak sexual landscape, but she draws back from the antipornography conclusions of a less insurgent, later time: In conclusion, I want to add a note about the special difficulties of attacking the sex class system through its means of cultural indoctrination...
...Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labor force...
...at the beginning of movements...
...Yet part of what has happened to feminist thought since Firestone is the development of wise, rich doubts on these very matters...
...No doubt Firestone invites some of these irritated readings...
...Life would be a drab and routine affair without at least that spark...
...Radical, it returns to founding texts...
...Knowledge doesn't turn out to be the instant kind of power we first expected it to be...
...Firestone felt herself to be throwing off a yoke, and in her first gallop, she wrote fast, wildly, freely...
...There is, however, a more solid inheritance: I liked the book then and I like it still—if, inevitably, with a difference...
...But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child —"That...
...I wrote: "Perhaps the reason membership in the women's movement is so often a painful experience is that the more we know, the more powerless and overwhelmed we feel...
...There is only the revolution...
...If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it...
...Ten years ago it might well have seemed merely dated, with its confidence in "cybernation" and its brash social generalizations about male and female, black and white (and most objectionably at moments about homosexuality...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
