Archives

The recent death of Shulamith Firestone marks a milestone in the history of second wave feminism, and encourages an historical perspective. Firestone was one of the most inspired and original political intellectuals of the sixties, and a founder of the modern feminist movement. I can speak personally here of the impact of Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1970) on my own life. When I first read the book, upon its publication, I immediately recognized that its portrait of a universal system of male domination rooted in the family was both the most important challenge to the Marxism that had shaped my worldview, and an equally important corrective to its blind spots. My 1972 book, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life began as a review of Firestone’s work and proposed both to answer and to learn from it.

In a recent New Yorker (April 15, 2013) Susan Faludi provided a powerful and moving account of Firestone’s brief, brilliant career and its tragic aftermath.Firestone was only twenty-five years old when she published Dialectic of Sex.

Every era defines its heroes. Ours is currently fixated on the innovating entrepreneur, creating something new that everyone must have. This type breaks the mold, striking out alone, even leaving school to do so. He (and he is usually a he) is designated as brilliant, sometimes charismatic, sometimes argumentative, often solitary in his vision, though gathering a team to put his vision into practice. His skills are more technical than poetic, more digital than prosodic. Neither poetry, nor prose is, by definition, entrepreneurial.

It’s important to have such innovators, but they are not necessarily heroic and they are not good role models for the millions of people already in the labor market looking desperately for work in an era of job contraction. Nor are they a good role model for the thousands of high school and college graduates entering the labor market each year.