At 25 she argued technology should free women from childbirth itself
Shulamith Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex in 1970, claiming women's oppression was rooted in pregnancy and that artificial reproduction could end it. Fellow feminists recoiled, yet the book later came to be read as an early forerunner of cyberfeminism. Three years earlier, a conference chairman had patted her head and told her to cool down.
Firestone was born Feuerstein in Ottawa on January 7, 1945, the second of six children of Orthodox Jewish parents: Kate Weiss, a German Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, and Sol Feuerstein, a Brooklyn salesman who helped liberate Bergen-Belsen when she was four months old. The family anglicised its name and moved to St. Louis. Her sister Tirzah recalled a controlling father who aimed much of his anger at Shulamith, who bristled at being told to make her brother's bed because she was a girl.
She skipped a year of school to join her brother at Washington University in St. Louis, then transferred, with her fees fully covered, to Chicago's art institute school, taking a painting degree in 1967 while sorting mail at the post office. That summer she went with about 2,000 young activists to the National Conference for New Politics, where she and Jo Freeman drafted a resolution on marriage and property law and women's control of their bodies. It was pushed to the end of the agenda and never discussed; the director, William F. Pepper, reportedly patted her head and dismissed women's problems. The pair responded by founding Westside, Chicago's first women's liberation group.
Moving to New York in October 1967, she co-founded New York Radical Women, the city's first women's liberation organisation, with Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch and others. When it collapsed in early 1969 she and Ellen Willis launched Redstockings, named after the 18th-century Blue Stockings Society, which built politics from consciousness raising and personal testimony. She also helped found New York Radical Feminists, staged a mock burial of traditional womanhood in 1968 and joined that year's Miss America protest.
Her theory borrowed from Marx and Engels while faulting them for missing sex as its own foundational class division. After leaving activism she was diagnosed with schizophrenia; her final book, Airless Spaces in 1998, gathered short stories drawn from that experience. She died on August 28, 2012.
Source: Shulamith Firestone
