Death of a Revolutionary

The life and death of pioneering feminist Shulamith Firestone:

“Midway through the service, the feminist author Kate Millett, now seventy-eight, approached the dais, bearing a copy of ‘Airless Spaces’ (1998), the only book that Firestone published after her landmark manifesto, ‘The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,’ which came out in 1970. Millett read from a chapter entitled ‘Emotional Paralysis,’ in which Firestone wrote of herself in the third person:

She could not read. She could not write. . . . She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.

“Clearly, something terrible had happened to Firestone, but it was not her despair alone that led Millett to choose this passage. When she finished reading, she said, ‘I think we should remember Shulie, because we are in the same place now.’ It was hard to say which moment the mourners were there to mark: the passing of Firestone or that of a whole generation of feminists who had been unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 8, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,097 words)
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