Winning and Losing On The Women’s Side

A year ago next month, Shulie (Shulamith Firestone) died a sad and lonely death. It could be said

that as a dedicated feminist she was once the most influential organizer, theoretician and

spokesperson at the grass-roots level in the U.S. Ms. Firestone was a leader in the sixties movement,

which she called the second wave of feminism. The first wave being about the woman’s vote

ending in a victory in 1920. Controversy was brewing from the start within the movement while

many wanted “to put bringing women in full participation in the mainstream of American society”,

Shulie, known in the movment as a firebrand, had a new vision of public and private life entirely.

In what amounts to a belated obit, Susan Faludi, in the April 15th New Yorker gives a loving account

of not only Ms. Firestone but of sixties and seventies feminism. Titled ‘The Death of a Revolutionary’.

It fascinated me and is the primary reference point of this reflection and is highly recommended for

any thinking about role of women. It is a quite sad but enlightening story.

A little over 5ft. tall, Shulie, also known as a fireball, shot across the sky in a powerful ball of energy and intelligence. Numerous grass-roots feminist organizations many of which generated seeds of other new like-minded organizations were founded by her, usually with another feminist co-founder. Influenced by Karl Marks and Freud she put together their ideas from unique feminist viewpoint and she was a vital connection in the networks of women mostly in Chicago and New York sharing a flexibility and ironically a feminism which she couldn’t control and was repeatedly fired from in the end.

Control of the feminist movement messages and direction prove to be an unsettled area even today. To many women identifying with feminism it is or should be equalitarian, meaning no leaders and in much the same way the Occupy movement suffered from the no-leaders debate, the good minds organizing the movement were quickly seen as acting like males needing to control. As Shulie put it in a comment to her live-in boy-friend, she had been forced out by an anti-leadership faction. “and guess who became the new leaders? The anti-leaders.”

This consistent rather anti-intellectual and anti-achievement mentality led to an existential aloneness not only for Shulie but her generation of feminist activists. Soon after she permanently resigned from the movement altogether, saying in a letter of resignation to The Congress to Unite Women, “... womens rage masquerading as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism under the ‘pro-women’ banner was turning into a frighteningly vicious anti-intellectual fascism of the left.” Her proclamation led several women including, Jo Freeman, who had organized the first abortion speak-out, to meet and “vowed to fight the problem”

“Instead each of us slipped back into our own isolation,” said Freeman, “the result was that most of the

women ... dropped out as I had done. Two ended up in a hospital with nervous breakdowns.” Faludi goes on

to document very sad results of important feminist leaders including, Kate Millett, author of, Sexual Politics,

who had been forced to reveal she was bisexual and then denounced for not having revealed it earlier. She

had a break-down and was committed to a mental hospital. After Ti-Grace Atkinson, resigned she was often

quoted as saying “Sisterhood is powerful, it kills” actually she originally said, “it kills mostly sisters.” Meredith

Tax, wrote in Firestones periodical, Notes from the Second Year, “... the condition of women constituted a

state of ‘female schizophrenia’ - a realm of unreality where a woman either belonged to a man or was

‘nowhere, disappeared, teetering on the edge of a void with no work to do and no felt identity at all’ ”

The story of Ms. Firestone ended after years of suffering decline, she was declared paranoid schizophrenic, in

and out of hospitals and with rising and falling levels of support. Her body was found after several days in her,

small fifth floor walk-up in a tenement apartment on East 10th Street. She had been surviving on public

assistance and no food was found in her place.

This typically long and detailed, New Yorker style article by Ms. Faludi is a among other things a meditation on

the women’s movement, the left of the sixties and the paradox of the sexes.

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- Ms. Firestone's important writings, Notes From the First Year, a periodical she founded in 1968, followed in 70 and 71 by Notes From the Second Year and the Third Year, her book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published in 1970, called brilliant and preposterous by the New York Times, it climbed in sales as it was being ridiculed on talk shows. Her final volume, Airless Space, was published in 1998.