1945–2012
○ Found dead at home
American radical feminist who called in The Dialectic of Sex for abolishing the sex class by seizing control of reproduction
In The Dialectic of Sex (1970) she extended Marx and Engels into a materialist view of history based on sex itself, arguing that women's oppression originated in the biology of pregnancy and childbirth.
An American radical feminist writer and activist, born in Ottawa and raised in St. Louis in an Orthodox Jewish family, who studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1967 she founded Westside in Chicago, the first independent women's liberation group since the suffrage movement, and in New York co-founded New York Radical Women, Redstockings and New York Radical Feminists. The Dialectic of Sex (1970) argued that just as the abolition of economic classes requires the proletariat to seize the means of production, the abolition of the sex class requires women to seize control of reproduction, and drew wide controversy. After leaving activism she lived with schizophrenia, and in 2012 she was found dead in her New York apartment.
Activities and affiliations
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1967–1970
Social movements and organizing
From Westside to The Dialectic of Sex
She was born in Ottawa on 7 January 1945 to Kate Weiss, a German Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, and Sol Feuerstein, a salesman from Brooklyn; the family anglicised its name to Firestone and moved to St. Louis, and her parents were Orthodox Jews. After Washington University she earned a BFA in painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967. In St. Louis she worked as an organiser for the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.
At the 1967 National Conference for New Politics in Chicago she and Jo Freeman submitted a resolution for equitable marital and property laws and women's complete control of their own bodies, which was never discussed. Afterwards the two founded Westside, the first independent women's liberation group since the suffrage movement. In October that year she moved to New York and co-founded New York Radical Women, then Redstockings with Ellen Willis in 1969 and New York Radical Feminists with Anne Koedt late that year, leaving the last by June 1970.
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published in September 1970, proposed a materialist view of history based on sex. Firestone drew on Marx and Engels while criticising them for offering no class-independent analysis of women's oppression, and wrote that just as the elimination of economic classes requires the proletariat to seize the means of production, the elimination of sexual classes requires women to seize control of reproduction, the end goal being the elimination not just of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself. Its advocacy of artificial reproduction and collective child-rearing caused wide controversy, and Angela Davis criticised it for reducing racism and class oppression to extensions of sexism.
After leaving activism she was diagnosed with schizophrenia; her last book, Airless Spaces (1998), was a collection of stories drawn from her experience of mental illness. On 28 August 2012 she was found dead in her New York apartment.