Shulamith Firestone quotes

Shulamith Firestone was a Canadian-American radical feminist, writer, and activist. Known for her influential book "The Dialectic of Sex," she played a key role in shaping second-wave feminism. She inspired future generations by challenging traditional notions of gender, family, and society. Here are 22 of her quotes:

In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality. It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. It's aim: overthrow of the oldest most rigid class/caste system in existence, the class system based on sex - a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles an undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence.

Shulamith Firestone

Radical Feminism. The two positions we have described usually generate a third, the radical feminist position: The women in its ranks range from disillusioned moderate feminists from NOW to disillusioned leftists from the women's liberation movement., and include others who had been waiting for just such an alternative, women for whom neither conservative bureaucratic feminism nor warmed-over leftist dogma had much appeal.

Shulamith Firestone

There is some irony in the fact that children imagine that parents can do what they want, and parents imagine that children do. "When I grow up..." parallels "Oh to be a child again..."

Shulamith Firestone

If we had to name the one cultural current that most characterizes America in the twentieth century, it might be the work of Freud and the disciplines that grew out of it.

Shulamith Firestone

The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer.

Shulamith Firestone

In the Middle Ages there was no such thing as childhood. The medieval view of children was profoundly different from ours.

Shulamith Firestone

The assumption that, beneath economics, reality is psychosexual is often rejected as ahistorical by those who accept a dialectical materialist view of history because it seems to land us back where Marx began: groping through a fog of utopian hypotheses, philosophical systems that might be right, that might be wrong (there is no way to tell); systems that explain concrete historical developments by a priori categories of thought; historical materialism, however, attempted to explain 'knowing' by 'being' and not vice versa.

Shulamith Firestone

Women have been allowed to achieve individuality only though their appearance.

Shulamith Firestone

We can also see the class basis of the emerging concept of child hood in the system of child education that came in along with it. If childhood was only an abstract concept, then the modern school was the institution that built it into reality.

Shulamith Firestone

Though the sex class system may have originated in fundamental biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological basis of their oppression has been swept away that women and children will be freed.

Shulamith Firestone

To grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the Kingdom of Nature does not reign absolute.

Shulamith Firestone

Constant erotic stimulation of male sexuality coupled with its forbidden release through most normal channels are designed to encourage men to look at women as only things whose resistance to entrance must be overcome.

Shulamith Firestone

Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child - That? Why you can't change that! You must be out of your mind!

Shulamith Firestone

Because class oppression of women and children couched in the phraseology of "cute" it is much harder to fight than open oppression.

Shulamith Firestone

A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure. For love, perhaps even more thanchildbearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today.

Shulamith Firestone

The myth of childhood has an even greater parallel in the myth of Femininity. Both women and children were considered asexual and thus"purer" than man. Their inferior status was ill-concealed under an elaborate "respect."

Shulamith Firestone

There is some irony in the fact that children imagine that parents can do what they want, and parents imagine that children do.

Shulamith Firestone

Contemporary slang reflects this animal state: children are "mice," "rabbits," "kittens," women are called "chicks," in England "birds," "hens," "dumb clucks," "silly geese," "old mares," "bitches."

Shulamith Firestone

The myth of childhood has an even greater parallel in the myth of Femininity. Both women and children were considered asexual and thus"purer" than man. Their inferior status was ill-concealed under an elaborate "respect." One didn't discuss serious matters nor did one curse in from of women and children; one didn't openly degrade them, one did it behind their backs.

Shulamith Firestone