Radical second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone was discovered dead on Tuesday at the age of 67 in her Upper East Side New York apartment.
She was the author of “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,” one of the most influential books of the feminist movement in the 1970s, and certainly a hugely influential book in my life (influential about so much more than just the smiles).
Her final years were, apparently, filled with isolation and mental illness, although she managed to continue writing. Her brilliance will be missed.
When I told P. about this she said “That’s too bad… she was right. No, right isn’t the point.”
It feels to me like we are losing a lot of brilliant thinkers lately. A lot of people I would have liked to have met. I guess we’re not immortal after all.
One of Firestone’s comrades in the early Chicago women’s movement was my old friend Naomi Weisstein. Her (probably) best-known article is here
http://www.cwluherstory.com/psychology-constructs-the-female.html
along with a lot of other important stuff, including a FIrestone essay. (Naomi’s is very funny–she actually did stand-up comedy for a while–and so is Pat Mainardi’s Politics of Housework.) Yeah, my generation are departing–not Boomers but a half-generation or so older, War babies who came to activism not in the legendary late 60′s but earlier, in the Eisenhower- and JFK-era anti-nuke and civil rights struggles. What saddens me, besides just losing people I care about, is that a certain fine-grained memory of history vanishes forever with those who actually lived it. Even the most careful, respectful later scholarship never manages to capture what the Summer of 1964 actually felt like; none of us old-timers individually can tell you, but an aggregated archive of our oral histories just might.