Neglected or Misunderstood Quotes

“In a sense, Firestone had always been writing about airless spaces. What else is the patriarchal nuclear family, in her analysis, than a place in which one looks for shelter, only to discover that one cannot breathe? Despite the vast differences between the two books, I therefore propose reading Airless Spaces as a kind of coda to The Dialectic of Sex. In its documenting of a brutal and alienating society in which people are subordinated to profit, it depicts a nightmare inversion of the more humane society glimpsed in the Dialectic. Read together, the two books proclaim that we don’t own each other: that we are equals: that we are all vulnerable and in need of care. They constitute an exhortation to mobilize our energies in the fight against the structures of twenty-first-century patriarchal capitalism that prevent us from seeing this and from acting accordingly”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“The mistake is to think that Firestone’s history of acute psychological distress somehow explains the Dialectic, allowing us to see that the meaning of its radicalism, its stridently nonconformist worldview, was always incipient mental illness. The Dialectic thus becomes read as a symptom of Firestone’s “madness.” Which means, of course, not reading it. Not engaging with its ideas; but instead, dismissing it from the scene of serious political and theoretical engagement.
But this is to get things the wrong way round. We must not use “mental illness” to depoliticize radical theory; but use radical theory to politicize “mental illness.” The urgent task is to identify and analyze the social and economic structures that work to produce a widespread psychological distress, to which are attributed diagnostic labels.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“Firestone is therefore claiming that there is a biological component to something that other feminists have taken to be purely cultural. For this, she has been criticized for biologism, or biological determinism. Donna Haraway, for example, has charged Firestone with making ‘the basic mistake of reducing social relations to natural objects’; which mistake – Haraway thinks – then leads Firestone into a dangerously reckless championing of technological control over nature. Michelle Barrett has also worried that Firestone’s account falls into ‘biologistic assumptions,’ wondering whether ‘“feminist biologism”’ can escape the problems of other biologisms – such as suggesting that there is little hope for change. But for Firestone, precisely the point is that without attributing biology some causal role, the ubiquity of male domination remains unexplained. And, I would add, because it is unexplained it precisely is therefore mystified. There is no accounting for why it should be the case that all societies (or even, if one wants to argue for exceptions, most societies) are, and have been, male-dominated. And precisely because there is no explanation, this phenomenon becomes available to other explanations that do seek to claim the correctness and immutability of male rule: to propose, for example, that it is the consequence of an innate male superiority.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“Men, Firestone claims, seek to fortify the power they are granted through women’s dependence and then to extend that domination wherever possible to other men. Men and women have been divided into two distinct classes by biology (producers and reproducers), but this fact in turn produces a psychological formation – a desire or need for power – that leads to the incessant formation of further divisions of humanity into unequal classes, castes or ‘races.’ It is in this sense, then, that for Firestone the oppression of women is natural: it is rooted in a reproductive biology that, for millennia, it has not been within the power of human beings to control.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“The Dialectic of Sex was above all else a manifesto – a public declaration of intent. It is a book that declares that a feminist revolution must happen, and that it can happen now, since for the first time in human history the technology exists to enable the root cause of women’s oppression to be addressed just as the contradictions of women’s situation
have emerged with such painful clarity. And like all
manifestos it is characterized by ‘compression’ and
‘hyperbole.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“[…], feminist discourse is so frequently
appropriated into a neoliberal framework,13 the Dialectic’s affront to “common sense” is precisely what is needed. Recoverable from among those second wave ideas that the
march of hegemonic values has left behind are radical impulses capable of being reformulated in order to energize a genuinely oppositional feminism – one that cannot easily be co-opted into strategies for selling makeup, lingerie, sex toys and pole dancing lessons, or for justifying the waging of
wars abroad.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“This book, therefore, will offer a defense of science fiction, and especially of its utopian variant. When Firestone called explicitly for utopian science fiction and then sketched one herself in her (in)famous final chapter, she did so while understanding that utopianism can be dangerous. But she did so, nonetheless, since she understood as well the opposing but greater dangers of not believing that something better is possible at all. Utopian visions don’t have to be about projecting a society deemed to be perfect,
and still less about doing so with finality. But they matter – perhaps even are crucially needed – because they disrupt one of the key functions of ideology: that of making the status quo seem that it could not be otherwise. Firestone’s work, as good science fiction, speculates about the possible direction of a future society in order to show that our present one both could and should be better than it is.
Fundamentally, I shall argue that despite its blind spots and flaws Firestone’s book is invaluable for feminist politics today.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“I propose, for example, that as a methodological principle, Firestone’s causal account of women’s subordination be
distinguished from her proposals for its solution. It is possible to hold that Firestone is right in the former, but wrong in the latter.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“And of course, feminist theory has evolved, and in ways that reveal that the Dialectic has some major failings. For example, one of the achievements of black, lesbian and working class feminists has been to expose the ways that much second wave theorizing proceeded from assumptions based upon white, straight and middle class experience. The Dialectic all too frequently assumes that ‘woman’ is a unitary category, and in so doing installs just that white, straight, middle class experience as the norm. We will explore some of the problems this produces, in relation to Firestone’s discussion of the family, and her deeply flawed and rightly criticized discussion of racism.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“Firestone disappeared from feminist politics
and writing in the same year that the book came out, to concentrate on working as an artist. From then until her death in 2012, she seemed to eschew being identified with her earlier activism and writing (she was one of very few of the founding women’s libbers, for example, who refused to be interviewed for Alice Echols’s illuminating study of early
US feminism).”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“For while there is much in the book that speaks the same language as twenty-first-century feminism, her radical proposals seem to have departed the field of rational debate. An end to the nuclear family? The abolition of wage labor? The creation of artificial wombs? Firestone’s manifesto can seem both preposterous and hopelessly outdated: a far-fetched, utopian hangover from a Swinging
Sixties radicalism that has been definitively surpassed by the realism of subsequent decades. Firestone’s revolutionary future can seem so fantastical that her book reads like science fiction.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“The Dialectic of Sex has been constantly apologized for as exemplary of 1970s
feminism’s worst excesses and failings. Subsequent feminists have criticized the book for biologism: for attributing to biology phenomena that it is thought are better understood as social or cultural in origins. It has been taken to task for technological determinism: for naively championing technological advance. Its assumption of the
ubiquity of patriarchy has been called dehistoricizing. And critics have objected to what is taken to be Firestone’s abjection of the pregnant female body: her construction of that body as an object of fear or repulsion.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“These are questions about the impact upon women of their role in procreation. But they are also questions about the arrangements in which we all cohabit, work, love and have sex. Who can be a mother? What does the nuclear family mean, for those both within and without one? What might be the effects of cybernetics on employment? What effects do ideas of romance and the erotic have upon our lives?”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone

“Its main thesis is that the origin of women’s oppression lies in biology itself. For Firestone, it is precisely the fact that it is women and not men who gestate a child, give birth in blood and pain, and shape their lives around another dependent human being that gives rise to male domination. This biological difference, she argues, divides humanity into two classes that are not equal, and this fundamental inequality then reproduces itself remorselessly at all levels of society. If Firestone’s analysis was stark, then her solution was revolutionary: since it is biology that is the problem, then biology must be changed, through a technological intervention that would begin with contraception and abortion but would end in the option of completely removing the reproductive process from women’s bodies. The Dialectic of Sex proposes a post-revolutionary world in which human society has been transformed in order to deliver women, children and ultimately also men from the tyranny of an oppression that is rooted in biology. [...] Sexual difference itself will have been eliminated.”
― Victoria Margree, Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone