Shulamith Firestone. Photograph by Michael Hardy, circa 1970.
Susan Faludi’s biographical study of Shulamith Firestone in the current New Yorker is required reading for anyone interested in the history of the last third of the twentieth century. It restores to her proper place one of the most inspired and original political intellectuals of the sixties, and a founder of modern feminism. 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, which 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.
Faludi gives 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 and when she died last year, at the age of sixty seven, she was alone, impoverished, forgotten and had been diagnosed as schizophrenic for decades. In recounting this tragic story, Faludi touches on a related topic, the split between women’s liberation and the Left, in which Firestone participated. In my view this is one of the most important, if not fully understood, stories of recent U.S. history.
As I see it, it is partly thanks to this split that there is no Left in the United States today. We do, of course, have protest movements of all sorts, but no Left in the more emphatic sense of a social and intellectual tendency capable of understanding American capitalism as a whole and critiquing it from an egalitarian point of view. Closely related to the absence of a Left in this sense is the decline of a radical tendency within feminism; just compare Firestone’s Dialectic, which came out of and partook of the New Left, to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. While some today think of the New Left as a brief explosive upheaval, which burnt out by 1968, the New Left actually had its roots in a preexisting radical tradition and a small but significant minority shared the goal of creating a permanent radical presence– a Left– in the United States. The defeat of that effort, which played itself out in the 1970s, has been important to the triumph of neo-liberalism, the drastic growth in inequality, the evisceration of public life, and other obviously problematic features of today’s world. For many young people, figures like Bill and Hilary Clinton, and Barack Obama, are what they know of a Left. For someone like myself, who can still remember what a Left means, this is an incredible loss.
Faludi shows how truly mad the psychological milieu in which Firestone operated was. Both Firestone and her contemporary, Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics, were driven out of the women’s movement by feminists who accused them of being male-identified, “unsisterly” “leaders.” This was known as “trashing,” a term that signified cleaning the ranks. In Faludi’s words, “Like a cancer, the attacks spread from those who had reputations to those who were merely strong; from those who were active to those who merely had ideas; from those who stood out as individuals to those who failed to conform rapidly enough to the twists and turns of the changing line.” One’s first thought might be that this was not just true of the early women’s movement, but of the whole New Left, indeed of the old Left, or even of the Occupy movements today. There is truth in this, but the truth does not obviate our responsibility to understand the irrationalities that characterized all these movements, and the differences amongst them.
In understanding the persecutory culture to which Firestone was subjected, a few qualifications are important. For one thing, it is necessary to distinguish the mass feminist movement, best represented by Betty Friedan and NOW, and squarely in the liberal tradition, from the far smaller women’s liberation tendency that included Firestone, and that was originally part of the Left. It was only in the latter that “trashing” occurred, and one would like to know why. Secondly, any one who has studied the history of revolutionary movements like women’s liberation knows the profound emotions and antinomian theories stirred up by the possibilities of liberation. Finally, trashing was condemned by advocates of women’s liberation of the time, such as Anselma Dell’Olio, the founder of the New Feminist Theater, who in a 1970 address, “Divisiveness and Self-Destruction in the Women’s Movement,” warned that women’s “rage, masquerading as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism under the ‘pro-woman’ banner,” was turning into “frighteningly vicious anti-intellectual fascism of the left.”
With these qualifications, understanding Firestone’s milieu helps establish the mentality in which advocates of women’s liberation decided to split with the New Left and pursue a stand-alone feminism. In Faludi’s account, which follows canonical texts of the period such as Ruth Rosen’s The World Split Open or Alice Echols’ Daring to Be Bad, women left the Left because of the intransigent sexism of New Left men. Here are Firestone’s own words, published in the Guardian in 1969: “We have more important things to do than to try to get you [i.e., men] to come around. You will come around when you have to, because you need us more than we need you. . . . The message being: Fuck off, left. You can examine your navel by yourself from now on. We’re starting our own movement.” In support of this view, Faludi provides many still-horrifying descriptions of Firestone and other women being shouted down at male dominated New Left events.
But is it really likely that the same women who were so irrational in their relations to figures like Firestone were rational when they thought about the men in the New Left? While there is an obvious experiential truth to the perception of men’s obtuseness, a moment’s reflection will convince the reader that it is an inadequate explanation. At root, the explanation minimizes women’s capacity to build the kind of mixed Left they wanted. It emphasizes women’s strongly negative experiences of working with men but it does not call attention to women’s powerful positive wish to be in an all-woman movement. Whatever failings the men of the New Left had, and no doubt they were many, it is far more reasonable to conclude that women left the Left because they wanted to, than because male sexism drove them out.
The costs of this split were great. As Barbara Deming, another feminist activist of the time, wrote, the split was a “tragedy.” The consciousness of the great movements of the 1960s was based on a shattering of social identity and a reaching out at the deepest possible level to achieve solidarity with people utterly unlike oneself. This was not only characteristic of the civil rights movement, whose original message was universalist and social democratic, but also of the student movements of the period. By contrast, the identity politics that fueled women’s liberation counter-posed the fight against one’s own oppression against what was perceived as the oppression of others. Anyone reading the literature of women’s liberation will find statements like that of Cathy Cade, a lesbian documentary photographer who explained, “in the black movement I had been fighting for someone else’s oppression and now there was a way that I could fight for my own freedom.” Or Mimi Feingold: “women couldn’t burn draft cards and couldn’t go to jail so all they could do was to relate through their men and that seemed to me the most really demeaning kind of thing.” Or the feminist collective that proclaimed, “the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” This is the language not only of women’s liberation but also of neo-liberal economics, born at the same time and as part of the same process.
Tragic though the split was, and important as it is to rethink it, there was a profound element to it that I want to end by affirming. Historically women had subordinated themselves to others. They had sacrificed to give the socialist movement its ethos, to build the civil rights movement in the South, and to support the draft-age men who refused to fight in Vietnam. Above all they had sacrificed to maintain the family, the institution that Firestone identified as the core of human oppression, not just of women, but of all human beings. To be sure, Firestone was wrong in her attack on what she called “the biological family.” The family is our salvation as well as a source of darkness and inequality. Nonetheless, it was right and good that the reliance of the family on women’s nurturant and “giving” qualities end, and that these qualities be shared by both genders. Women’s liberation was a way of saying that women would not be the sole givers and caretakers anymore, and that recognition will surely be indispensable to any Left that we create in the future.
Eli Zaretsky is the author of Why America Needs a Left: An Historical Argument.
I remember in Nixon times, when Michael Lerner, Susan Stern et al were facing conspiracy charges in Seattle, and this purportedly feminist “truth squad” came through Ann Arbor to tell people not to support the Seattle defendants because Michael Lerner was this horrible sexist and Susan Stern was male-identified and on and on. And one wonderered who these women were and who was paying for their mudslinging tour.
There was plenty of sectarian weirdness to go around, and just about all of us look back at our thinking in those times and if we are honest realize how primitive we were in our pretend sophistication. But there was more than that. There was the hand of people who did not wish the causes of progress well, there were Nixon people and like-minded authorities playing active roles in instigating and carrying out the vilification campaigns. They did it with a vengeance to the Black Panthers, but they did it to everyone progressive. A few bits of documentary evidence have emerged over the years, with the most significant MO evidence being the COINTELRPO documents and all the stuff that came out about the Nixon White House’s “dirty tricks.” But surely it was far more extensive than we know.
Which is not to say that people need to go onto a digression to root out spies and saboteurs. However, certain behaviors should be noted for their effects and those who indulge in them should be quietly scrutinized and if necessary isolated. Certainly the use of provacateurs, from the wild-talking (un)holy man who talks about weapons to naive youngsters from the mosque to the faux anarchist “man of action” to the hiree who defecates for the TV cameras at the Occupy gathering, is quite widespread today. Everyone needs to be aware, and us old buzzards need to counsel the new generations of activists about what we should have learned, alas usually the hard way.
“Provocateur,” it is. I’m such a clumsy typist.
Great piece Eli, BUT there is no hope for resolving these issues without a universalist spiritual politics–that embraces of the uniqueness of our infinite particularity–but that knits us together in spite of our fear of each other, in spite of our alienated/paranoid conditioning. The more open I am to you, the more vulnerable I am to disappointment and deep humiliation.Only a healing politics can bridge that historical memory.
I certainly agree that the only way to overcome a profoundly alienated & alienating system, whose trademark is a cult of individualism, is – as Peter Gabel says – through a universalist (or internationalist) politics. But why MUST such a politics necessarily also be spiritual? It can also be based in materialism, in an internalized sense of the social/communal nature of what it means to be human.That was the point of Marx’s early philosophical writings & it seems to me that this is very much as valid, & accessible, an entry point to participation in left politics as spirituality.
I am rather confused by this article… Are you saying that women are to blame for the demise of the New Left? That their affirmation of an identity as women was neo-liberal and thus undermined the solidarity of the New Left?
What about the men in the New Left that created a hostile environment for women who spoke up? It seems odd to me to split hairs over women wanting to leave or being driven out: Faced with the massive sexist harassment documented in Susan Faludi’s article, who wouldn’t want to leave and be in a more supportive environment?!?
The questions that come to my mind, then, is why the women’s groups ended up being not supportive either, how trashing arose, and even more important, how we can prevent it in movements. None of these questions are addressed in this article.
I too would like to see an exploration of Rachel’s questions. Also, I would like to know the supporting arguments for the statement, “This is the language not only of women’s liberation, but also of neo-liberal economics, born at the same time and as part of the same process.” If it means what I think it means, then I would respond that I think a focus on one’s own liberation is not at all like neo-liberal economics, whose message seems to be “I’ve got mine, forget you (or another “f” word with a similar meaning).” I think women’s focus on self-liberation is a prerequisite for being able to work for other people’s freedom. As the airline stewards tell us, “Put on your own mask before helping others.”
In regard to Rachel’s question I do not deny that there was sexism in the New Left, to be sure. But the women’s movement was also welcomed by many men. One example is my book, Capitalism, the Family and Personal lIfe, which was published in 1972. But there are many other examples, especially in the more mature sectors of the New Left such as New University Conference, NAM and DSOC. THe truth is that Faludi’s characterization is vastly oversimplified. Gloria Steinem was co-director of DSOC if I remember correctly with Michael Harrington. THe encounter of women’s liberation with the New Left or, better, the eruption of women’s liberation WITHIN the New Left could have gone in many ways. I personally did not see men shouting women down but I have o doubt that it existed. However, at the time I would have regarded the men that did that as jerks, just as I regard the men who yelled that Hillary should iron their shirts as jerks. I think we need a much more extended understanding of what happened than just saying the men were jerks.
We’re you there Eli? I was. Do you not understand that the women’s liberation movement had to be independent and led by women? I do not recall that the male dominated left regarded the limits placed on women as very important. Did you know that law, medical, vet schools rarely accepted women; that women were not allowed on the floor of the stock exchange thus could not be brokers; that women could not have lunch in certain public restaurants; that certainly they were not accepted at certain private clubs and are not to this day; that women had to go in the back entrance of eg the Commonwealth Club even if one of them was the keynote speaker. Do you recall that the First Wave stepped aside at the request of Frederick Douglass to succor their black friends. They gave up their self interest. If you maintain there is no left, it’s because it’s female handmaidens have split that scene …never to return. We learned the lesson at last. When Shulie Firestone said she was not interested in the Ladies Auxillary movement, she nailed it.
I was there. If you read Capitalism the family and personal life written in 1972 you see another side of the male new left– 100% welcoming to the women’s liberation movement. THis was not unusual.THe struggle to have a mixed left went on through the seventies. Gloria Steinem was a co-chair of DSOC. WHy should the men who scoffed at women’s liberation be taken as representative of the New LEFt? It wouldn’t matter at all, except for the fact that we have no left today, and we have a women’s movement whose politics is at best unclear, when it comes to the questions of social equality, jobs in general, or AMerica’s role in the world. We need a Left that includes women’s liberation and of course we need an independent women’s movement too.
I’ll fwd yr piece to Cathy Cade, if she wishes to reply herself; but having uttered much the same words, I can say for myself you misconstrued them terribly. When I said, and still do that ” before the women’s movement, I was a mere liberal, willing to march for Civil rights or tutor Black History IF it was convenient and the recruiter– usually In my case, Cathy Cade– punched the right button to prick my conscience to stand up for others, but with the women’s movement, i was radicalized, I was standing up for myself as
well, and this converted me from a liberal
supporter of The Movement for civil rights and
against the Viet nam war, into a radical
member of The Movement, a reliable ally of
others struggles for justice which I understood increasingly as I studied, talked and wrote about them as inextricably related. Had this influence within WLM not been squashed, as I now learn was Schulee’s, the dialectic between them would have reached the revolutionary clarity, synthesis, we were struggling toward; and Jewish and Arab men might have followed John Lennon in Burying machismo along with Martyred Motherhood, (the effigy of which Shulie and I made together ‘tho our eulogies differed) instead of John Wayne
very interesting comment. Thank you, eli
several people have asked me, why I dont link identity politics to black power. The short answer is that I do or would in a longer, more developed piece, but I still think there is a difference. Black AMerica was sometimes understood as a separate nation. There was a famous “black nation” thesis. If different nations do not want to be part of the same country, this can be understood. Czechs and Slovaks for example– they separated. I dont see women as a separate nation from men, so this is an important difference. Overall though< I agree with those who emphasize the widespread sense of identity politics in the sixties, including in the black community. I only insist that we begin to see the complexity and historical sutuatedness of what happened in the seventies.
We do not need a women’s movement that is part of the “new left”. We must remain independent. We’ve been co-opted too often and too easily. Can we co-operate? Sure. On our terms and in our own way. A true woman radical is bred in the bone. And usually knows she is a second class citizen by age five or so. She also knows her culture re-inforces that notion so deeply that it seems hopeless. It is not hopeless.
But it is a hard slog and there is much, much more to be done.
Shalom to all of you-taking the care and time to respond about Shulamith F. and what happened w/her, and the situation.
I was there, and very much part of what happened also.-a peripheral civil rights worker in SNCC, much more so in west oast CNVA-committee for non-violent action, demo’s in front of Federal Bldg. Minneapolis-7 a,m. and working at jobs I hated,-didn’t see any way out., responsibilities to my two families. started protest against Minneapolis employment officefor sexist discrimination-which eventually became Female Liberation -office, newsletter, and organizing movement -University, offices, factory and across race lines- and consistent picketing over a year in front of Minneapolis Star and Trib. to de-sexigate the want ads. We were the first in the country-which effort did ultimately succeed. it began with an effort-first to get me into a program learning welding-then to integrate women into the trades.
I’d gotten it together-sort of-with help-mostly from a woman who had been in Vista and New York and was committed anti-poverty worker. She was from Hibbing and had been a neighbor of Robert Zimmerman.( I always had trouble dealing with not only the employment office, but really any kind of bureaucracy-which problem has grown exponentially over the years, and really been my demise. )-after something of a nervous breakdown behind my jobs, not being accepted as a draft counselor at Twin Cities Draft Information Center, and concern and pressure for & from both my families. 1967-68.
AT the time, it was really important to the young men being drafted, fighting the draft, that they have a male identity beyond that of soldiers and killers. Burning the draft cards, oppressing women into woman-ing the mimeo graph machine in the basement, demanding sex. etc. But it also was the endless intellectual talk and ‘positioning” of New Left/Old Left politics. Which led women to look at our own situations, and realize that what one does everyday is political, and not a separate world, for the bed, basement, kitchen, etc.
To begin with, there were factions that came to the meetings about job discrimination who weren’t interested. Why talk about work? and then there were Trotskyist women who wanted to break up the effort. The women who weren’t interested in ‘work’, or the economic factor in women’s oppression were also at the time afraid of lesbianism, and outright said to me that my home life of my mother being beaten was “class”.
And that’s what continued. There were men who were supportive of the job integration movement. But they weren’t the traditional leftists, who were still busy with their endless talk and analysis, being the cadre, divorcing life from politics, and oppressing us also. There was a split in the Minneapolis group-following what went on elsewhere-the side that was ‘:Pro-Woman’, and laterj umped on a lesbian bandwagon-an issue that they had earlier abhorred. It was all about class. This element also
Shalom to all of you-taking the care and time to respond about Shulamith F. and what happened w/her, and the situation.
I was there, and very much part of what happened also.-a peripheral civil rights worker in SNCC, much more so in west oast CNVA-committee for non-violent action, demo’s in front of Federal Bldg. Minneapolis-7 a,m. and working at jobs I hated,-didn’t see any way out., responsibilities to my two families. started protest against Minneapolis employment officefor sexist discrimination-which eventually became Female Liberation -office, newsletter, and organizing movement -University, offices, factory and across race lines- and consistent picketing over a year in front of Minneapolis Star and Trib. to de-sexigate the want ads. We were the first in the country-which effort did ultimately succeed. it began with an effort-first to get me into a program learning welding-then to integrate women into the trades.
I’d gotten it together-sort of-with help-mostly from a woman who had been in Vista and New York and was committed anti-poverty worker. She was from Hibbing and had been a neighbor of Robert Zimmerman.( I always had trouble dealing with not only the employment office, but really any kind of bureaucracy-which problem has grown exponentially over the years, and really been my demise. )-after something of a nervous breakdown behind my jobs, not being accepted as a draft counselor at Twin Cities Draft Information Center, and concern and pressure for & from both my families. 1967-68.
AT the time, it was really important to the young men being drafted, fighting the draft, that they have a male identity beyond that of soldiers and killers. Burning the draft cards, oppressing women into woman-ing the mimeo graph machine in the basement, demanding sex. etc. But it also was the endless intellectual talk and ‘positioning” of New Left/Old Left politics. Which led women to look at our own situations, and realize that what one does everyday is political, and not a separate world, for the bed, basement, kitchen, etc.
To begin with, there were factions that came to the meetings about job discrimination who weren’t interested. Why talk about work? and then there were Trotskyist women who wanted to break up the effort. The women who weren’t interested in ‘work’, or the economic factor in women’s oppression were also at the time afraid of lesbianism, and outright said to me that my home life of my mother being beaten was “class”.
And that’s what continued. There were men who were supportive of the job integration movement. But they weren’t the traditional leftists, who were still busy with their endless talk and analysis, being the cadre, divorcing life from politics, and oppressing us also. There was a split in the Minneapolis group-following what went on elsewhere-the side that was ‘:Pro-Woman’, and laterj umped on a lesbian bandwagon-an issue that they had earlier abhorred. It was all about class. There was an effort to examine psychology. A chief way women were oppressed was through relationships-and male control. But for working class women it wasn’t only about relationships and being called crazy and the little woman, it was economic.
What went down, and continues to this day-is that middle class women and upper class originated women greatly strive and want to be in the mainstream. They don’t see anything wrong with laissez faire capitalism, they are eager to join it, and have. While there was a critique of craziness and mental illness, now this group has joins and directs the bureaucracy; the child protection agencies that take children away from their parents into more oppressive and a succession of foster homes-where sometimes the children die-direct forced drugging of the poor, and are still crying for funds for their endless non-profits-none of which that I remember, have any oversight of the people they supposedly serve. The battered women’s movement was also class based to begin with-although there was more concern in the seventies. Ti-Grace Atkinson and Kate Millet are very correct-and from my personal experience-Sisterhood is Powerful-it kills. Yes, true. This is what went on in the first wave also.
What we’re facing now is something of a take-over of our country by the capitalists, and those who like and want to imitate them. Unfortunately too many are women. The take over is accomplished by conditioning, control and brainwashing, and splitting people off from one another. There is no ‘loving kindness’ or connection-in present Judaism or Buddhism either in America-only the race to save oneself, above others. Here in Washington, there’s silencing and retaliation -probably goes on elsewhere also. (that’s my experience of it). and i’m probably now a crazy elder, definitely poor and somewhat isolated. But hey, the nature up here is Beautiful