Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone (also Shulie Firestone , born January 7, 1945 in Ottawa ; died August 28, 2012 in New York City ) was a Canadian-born writer and the founder of radical feminism in the United States. She was one of the most prominent and influential theorists of the international women's movements in the 1960s / 70s. Her book The Dialectic of Sex is discussed as a feminist basic work up to the present day.

Life

Family and studies

Shulamith Firestone was born Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein in Ottawa in 1945 . She grew up as one of six children in an Orthodox Jewish family in St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri . Her parents changed her surname to Firestone when Shulamith was a child. While studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago , which she graduated in 1967, she became the subject of a documentary that was initially unreleased and portrayed Firestone as an unknown student who paints about her life as a young woman. The film also shows the humiliating criticism of her artistic work by male professors. The experimental filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin rediscovered film in the 1990s. For her expanded version from 1997 under the title Shulie , she used actors who, according to original documents and in the same locations, can look back on 30 years of social development in the USA and the emergence of second wave feminism.

Feminist awakening

While living in Chicago , Firestone was active in civil rights and anti-war movements. Together with political scientist Jo Freeman , she founded the Westside Group , a predecessor of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union , which advocated socialist feminism . In October 1967 she moved to New York to help the New York Radical Women (NYRW) in their early days. The NYRW was split into a socialist and a radical feminist wing, Firestone being the central figure in the latter group. When the NYRW broke up, Firestone founded the group Redstockings together with Ellen Willis in 1969 . The term redstockings is a neologism , based on blue stockings , the derogatory expression for intellectual women's rights activists, and red for the left revolutionary orientation. Soon afterwards she left the association to co-found the New York Radical Feminists with the Danish Anne Koedt . The group met regularly for so-called consciousness-raising , a method in which, starting from the subject, one's own biography is remembered and reflected on as a chain of situations. This creates 'concern', which becomes intersubjective when it coincides with that of other women. The main topics were sexuality, rape , sexual abuse , lesbianism , motherhood, the relationship between gender and class . In 1968/69 Firestone wrote several critical essays on the women's movement in the USA.

Women's Liberation and Sexual Revolution

She had already presented her radical theses on the connection between women's liberation and the sexual revolution many times before she became a bestselling author in 1970 with her book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (German: Women's Liberation and Sexual Revolution , 1975), only 25 years old has been. She dedicated her analysis to Simone de Beauvoir , but went beyond Beauvoir by advocating a feminist program for the realization of a liberated society more than she did. Referring to Marx and Engels, she viewed human history as the history of struggles between the sexes. Firestone called on women to take control of reproduction. It is now technically possible to ensure the reproduction of mankind no longer only through natural, but also through artificial reproduction. This made it possible to smash the "tyranny of the biological family" and to increase the opportunities for women to develop. Just as the aim of the socialist revolution is not only to abolish "economic class privileges", but also "class differences" as such, at the end of the feminist revolution there must be "not simply the elimination of male privileges, but gender differences" and the creation of an androgynous culture, in which all sexual dualisms are overcome. Firestone hopes that under the conditions of a liberated society, “human relationships can only change positively”.

The book is still considered a fundamental feminist work to the present day and is quoted by the new generation of American feminist authors such as Kathleen Hanna , Naomi Wolf and Jennifer Baumgardner .

Withdrawal in the 1970s

During the 1970s, Shulamith Firestone retired from politics and public life and focused on painting. Firestone had suffered from schizophrenia for a long time . After staying in a psychiatric clinic, she published a collection of short stories in 1998 under the title Airless Spaces , a fictional chronicle of her later life. Although she writes in the third person, it is her own experience.

She lived alone for the last few decades. On August 28, 2012, Shulamith Firestone was found dead in her apartment in the East Village , Manhattan . According to her sister Miriam Tirzah Firestone, she died of natural causes. The New York culture magazine n + 1 published in September 2012 under the title In Memoriam. On Shulamith Firestone, numerous essays and anecdotes by companions and admirers of Firestone's, including Jennifer Baumgardner, Chris Kraus , Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kate Millett , Phyllis Chesler .

Works

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), German translation by Gesine Strempel-Frohner: Women's Liberation and Sexual Revolution (1975), Fischer TB, Frankfurt a. M. 1987, ISBN 3-596-24701-2 (woman in society 42)
- from it: Down with Childhood !, in: Kursbuch 34, focus on “Children”, Rotbuch, Berlin 1973 (December), pp. 1–24
Airless Spaces , Semiotext (e), Los Angeles 1998, ISBN 978-1-57027-082-6
- Sianne Ngai: Shulamith Firestone's Airless Spaces ( Memento from July 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), review, August 31, 2012

Web links

Literature by and about Shulamith Firestone in the catalog of the German National Library
Shulamith Firestone , texts in the Marxists Internet Archive
Shulamith Firestone , Encyclopædia Britannica
Susan Faludi : Death of a Revolutionary , The New Yorker, April 15, 2013

Notes and individual references

↑ Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67 , New York Times , Aug. 30, 2012.
↑ Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex , in: Margaret A. Simons: Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race and the Origins of Existentialism , Rowman & Littlefield 2001, ISBN 978-0-7425-1246-7 , pp. 33f.
↑ Barbara Holland-Cunz: The old new women's question , Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2003, p. 141
↑ Shulie : Film and Stills by Elisabeth Subrin, The Jewish Museum ( Memento of the original from August 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The film was u. a. shown at the New York Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art , the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Biennale . @1@ 2

^ Jo Freeman (1970): The Tyranny of Structurelessness (PDF)

↑ Redstocking's Manifesto .

↑ The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (1970). The book was published in German in 1974 ( The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm ) as the first pirated print from the Berlin Women's Center.

^ New York Radical Feminists, March 1976 statement

↑ cf. Voichita Nachescu: Becoming the Feminist Subject. Consciousness-raising Groups in Second Wave Feminism (PhD 2006, available from Google Books ).

↑ ^a ^b Julie Bindel: Shulamith Firestone obituary. In: The Guardian, September 2012.

↑ Kristina Schulz: "Sisterhood is powerful". American radical feminism . In: Dies .: The long breath of provocation. The women's movement in Germany and France 1968–1976 , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2002, pp. 45f.

^ Women's History

↑ cf. Jennifer Baumgardner: F 'em !: Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls , Seal Press 2011, ISBN 978-1-58005-360-0 ( available on Google Books )

^ ^A ^b Margalit Fox: Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67 , The New York Times August 30, 201 2

↑ On Firestone, n + 1 September 26, 2012, online

↑ Firestone argued, referring to Philippe Ariès , that one cannot talk about the liberation of women without discussing the liberation of children.

personal data
SURNAME	Firestone, Shulamith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Firestone, Shulie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Canadian feminist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 7, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH	Ottawa , Canada
DATE OF DEATH	August 28, 2012
Place of death	New York City

[NYT-1] Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67 , New York Times , Aug. 30, 2012.

[2] Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex , in: Margaret A. Simons: Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race and the Origins of Existentialism , Rowman & Littlefield 2001, ISBN 978-0-7425-1246-7 , pp. 33f.

[3] Barbara Holland-Cunz: The old new women's question , Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2003, p. 141

[4] Shulie : Film and Stills by Elisabeth Subrin, The Jewish Museum ( Memento of the original from August 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The film was u. a. shown at the New York Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art , the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Biennale . @1@ 2

[5] Jo Freeman (1970): The Tyranny of Structurelessness (PDF)

[6] Redstocking's Manifesto .

[7] The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (1970). The book was published in German in 1974 ( The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm ) as the first pirated print from the Berlin Women's Center.

[8] New York Radical Feminists, March 1976 statement

[9] . Voichita Nachescu: Becoming the Feminist Subject. Consciousness-raising Groups in Second Wave Feminism (PhD 2006, available from Google Books ).

[Guardian2012-10] Julie Bindel: Shulamith Firestone obituary. In: The Guardian, September 2012.

[11] Kristina Schulz: "Sisterhood is powerful". American radical feminism . In: Dies .: The long breath of provocation. The women's movement in Germany and France 1968–1976 , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2002, pp. 45f.

[12] Women's History

[13] . Jennifer Baumgardner: F 'em !: Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls , Seal Press 2011, ISBN 978-1-58005-360-0 ( available on Google Books )

[NYT2012-14] A ^b Margalit Fox: Shulamith Firestone, Feminist Writer, Dies at 67 , The New York Times August 30, 201 2

[15] On Firestone, n + 1 September 26, 2012, online

[16] Firestone argued, referring to Philippe Ariès , that one cannot talk about the liberation of women without discussing the liberation of children.