Neglected or Misunderstood Read online

  Airless Spaces consists of 51 vignettes, ranging in length from a short paragraph to a few pages, and grouped under the headings ‘Hospital,’ ‘Post-Hospital,’ ‘Losers,’ ‘Obits’ and ‘Suicides I Have Known.’ These are centered upon the lives of briefly introduced persons living in New York State, and sometimes within or around its mental institutions. There is nothing to identify the sketches as being either fictional or drawn from life, and no explicit identification of the ‘I’ that appears after the first few stories as Firestone herself. But the back cover tells us that ‘Refusing a career as a professional feminist, Shulamith Firestone found herself in an “airless space” – approximately since the publication of her first book The Dialectic of Sex.’

  What might be meant by an ‘airless space’ is suggested in the brief ‘Frontispiece’ to the book. Firestone (as I shall identify the narratorial voice) tells us of a dream in which she is on a sinking ship, a ‘luxury liner like the Titanic.’ While on the upper decks the doomed people try to disguise their fear with ‘gaiety and mirth,’ Firestone goes down into the ship, searching for a space that would ‘supply an air pocket,’ in which she might survive ‘even after the boat was fully submerged until it should be found.’ Eventually she stows herself inside a refrigerator. Waking in ‘panic’ and convinced ‘the disaster was real,’ Firestone calls the authorities. There is indeed a liner sinking, she is told, but it is in the Bermuda Triangle, so no rescue attempt will be made.

  The people in the stories are, like the dreamer of the Frontispiece, the ones who cannot stay on the upper decks. Isolated by their inability to feign merriment, they must search alone for some space that, however constricted, allows them to continue holding on. For insomniac Bettina, deprived of even the smallest ‘buffer’ of sleep by the hospital’s ‘high, narrow’ bed, its ‘fifteen-minute head counts all night long,’ her medication and the warmth of her dormitory, this is found for the few brief nights in which, having secreted away the thermostat control, she is able to lie in chilled air, ‘still as a corpse,’ in simulation of sleep (32–3). For the elderly Pauline, once a ‘noted pianist’ and now a ‘paranoid’ whom only a wealthy background protects from ‘permanent institutionalization,’ it is the classical music played on radio station WISS; until the ‘weak works’ and the advertisements so predominate over the music she loves that she turns the station off for good (100, 102). Lynn, who lives on disability checks, dates Neil, albeit just as friends, until she can no longer bear his self-absorption and obvious contempt for her.

  The protagonists of these stories are struggling to maintain some degree of happiness, dignity or personal autonomy in a world in which the shattering of hopes for intimacy or meaning is the norm. Hospitalization, the sketches suggest, is rarely a form of rescue. Instead, in-patient life produces routine humiliations that dehumanize and depersonalize, producing as much as alleviating the conditions that the professionals purport to diagnose. Corrine refuses to shower until the hospital water quality has been improved; it is only when a forced shower, conducted with ‘brutal … merriment,’ leaves her hair ‘matted and stiff with chemicals’ from unwashed-out soap that she ‘began to look like a mental patient’ (14–16). Ellis Martin Sheen lives on food stamps and participates as little as possible in his day-group meetings, until one day he demands irately to know who has ever seen him drinking. His social worker, ‘needing a handy pigeon-hole to account for Martin’s emotional illness,’ has ‘decided that Martin was an alcoholic’ (81). Leon Feldsher is registered disabled ‘by virtue of mental distress … though no-one was quite sure just which psychiatric ailment he had’ (82).

  As the book progresses, it becomes increasingly apparently autobiographical, increasingly clear that the ‘I’ of these tales at least is the author of the famous feminist manifesto. We learn of Firestone’s visit to Valerie Solanas, the author of the radical feminist SCUM Manifesto who shot Andy Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya in 1968. ‘It was not that I admired her deed,’ Firestone tells us. ‘Nor did I particularly value her book,’ which she had never considered ‘serious feminist theory’ (130). Valerie in turn takes a ‘scored … all over’ copy of the Dialectic from her shelf and tells her, ‘I didn’t like your book,’ though Firestone is unperturbed (131). ‘Some time later,’ Firestone tells us, she often sees Valerie on the streets, evidently seriously unwell and begging for quarters (131–2). Firestone seemingly reverts to the third person to write about herself from a distance in a number of stories. In ‘Myrna Glickman,’ for example, we hear about ‘Rozzie,’ a ‘founding member’ of the Stanton-Anthony Brigade of the New York Radical Feminists, who is betrayed by her friend, the straitlaced but easily led Myrna (117). ‘Emotional Paralysis’ describes the disabling inertia of life after release from mental hospital. Its unidentified ‘she’ ‘sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago’ (59). But she herself cannot read, or write, the ‘old excitement of creation’ being gone and in its place an inability to ‘care about anything’ (59).

  The volume’s final, and longest, piece, ‘Danny,’ tells the devastating story of Firestone’s brother: of their initial closeness and mutual support in the face of warring parents, ‘heavy-duty reli gious observation … imposed on us’ (151) and neighborhood anti-semitism; of their growing estrangement as Danny learns to hate girls, and Firestone becomes secularized; and of Danny’s apparent suicide in mysterious circumstances. The uncertainty around his death, Firestone tells us in the final sentence of the book, ‘contributed to my own growing madness – which led to my hospitalization, medication, and a shattering nervous breakdown’ (160).

  There is a danger in ending a book on Firestone in this way. It is the danger of encouraging a mistake that occasionally even my very perceptive students make.

  The mistake is to think that Firestone’s history of acute psychological distress somehow explains the Dialectic, allowing us to see that the meaning of its radicalism, its stridently nonconformist worldview, was always incipient mental illness. The Dialectic thus becomes read as a symptom of Firestone’s “madness.” Which means, of course, not reading it. Not engaging with its ideas; but instead, dismissing it from the scene of serious political and theoretical engagement.

  But this is to get things the wrong way round. We must not use “mental illness” to depoliticize radical theory; but use radical theory to politicize “mental illness.” The urgent task is to identify and analyze the social and economic structures that work to produce a widespread psychological distress, to which are attributed diagnostic labels.

  In a sense, Firestone had always been writing about airless spaces. What else is the patriarchal nuclear family, in her analysis, than a place in which one looks for shelter, only to discover that one cannot breathe? Despite the vast differences between the two books, I therefore propose reading Airless Spaces as a kind of coda to The Dialectic of Sex. In its documenting of a brutal and alienating society in which people are subordinated to profit, it depicts a nightmare inversion of the more humane society glimpsed in the Dialectic. Read together, the two books proclaim that we don’t own each other: that we are equals: that we are all vulnerable and in need of care. They constitute an exhortation to mobilize our energies in the fight against the structures of twenty-first-century patriarchal capitalism that prevent us from seeing this and from acting accordingly.

  Endnotes

  1. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (London: The Women’s Press, 1979), pp.105–6.

  2. Piercy, p.102.

  3. Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman (Winchester and Washington: Zer0 Books, 2009); Laurie Penny, Meat Market: Female Flesh under Capitalism (Winchester and Washington: Zer0 Books, 2010). See also Maureen Nappi, ‘Shulamith Firestone: Cybernetics and Back to a Feminist Future,’ in Situations, 6:1&2, pp.187–212.

  4. Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford, eds, Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  5. Ann Snitow, quoted by Merck in ‘Shulamith Firestone and Sexual Difference,’ in Further Adventures, p.13.

  6. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.67.

  7. Susan Faludi, ‘Death of a revolutionary,’ The New Yorker, 15 April 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/death-of-a-revolutionary

  8. Faludi.

  9. Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), p.93.

  10. Echols.

  11. Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston, London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p.79.

  12. See Sam McBean, Feminism’s Queer Temporalities (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), p.55.

  13. See for example Nancy Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,’ New Left Review, 56, 2009; also Power.

  14. Jo Freeman, ‘On Shulamith Firestone,’ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-15/in-memoriam/on-shulamith-firestone/

  15. Merck, p.11. In the years subsequent to the Dialectic’s publication, when Firestone had retired from public life and requested that the documentary not be made public, it was recreated on a shot-by-shot basis by feminist filmmaker Elizabeth Subrin, who substitutes for the male filmmakers’ voiceover her own narration. The remade film apparently elicited from the older Firestone responses ranging from cautious acceptance to anger and dismay.

  16. The following account is taken from Echols, p.117.

  17. Echols, p.142.

  18. Echols, p.140. The quotation is from a Redstockings flyer from 1973.

  19. Echols, p.196.

  20. Echols, p.152, p.192 and elsewhere.

  21. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin, 2010).

  22. Echols, p.141.

  23. NARAL: Pro-Choice America, ‘The safety of legal abortion and the hazards of illegal abortion,’ 1 January 2015, p.5, http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/media/fact-sheets/abortion-distorting-science-safety-legal-abortion.pdf

  24. Echols, p.141.

  25. Echols, p.141.

  26. See the memoir by Linnea Johnson, ‘Something real: Jane and me. Memories and exhortations of a feminist exabortionist,’ http://www.cwluherstory.org/something-real-jane-and-me-memories-and-exhortations-of-a-feminist-ex-abortionist.html

  27. Sarah Franklin, ‘Revisiting Reprotech: Firestone and the Question of Technology,’ in Further Adventures, p.45.

  28. Stella Sandford, ‘The Dialectic of the Dialectic of Sex,’ in Further Adventures, p.235.

  29. See for example, O’Brien, for whom Firestone confuses mere dichotomy for dialectic (in the former, opposites can coexist; in the latter, opposition commands mediation): O’Brien, p.80. For both Stella Sandford and Tim Fiskin, however, there are several different dialectics being pointed to, at least implicitly, in Firestone’s text. See Sandford, pp.241–3; and Tim Fiskin, ‘Technology, Nature, and Liberation: Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectical Theory of Agency,’ in Further Adventures, p.199. Alison Assiter has argued that the notion of ‘sexual class’ doesn’t work, since there can be no correlatives for Marx’s modes and forces of production, or surplus value (pp.72–3). Caroline Bassett, however, has pointed out that it is often unclear quite how Firestone is using Marx: at times, she observes, Marxism seems to be less an ‘operational model’ and more an ‘allegorical model’ for an actually quite different kind of revolution. See Bassett, ‘Impossible, Admirable, Androgyne: Firestone, Technology and Utopia,’ in Further Adventures, p.91.

  30. Quoted in Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution,’ New Left Review, 40, December 1966, https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/mitchell-juliet/longest-revolution.htm

  31. Friedrich Engels, ‘Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State,’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02c.htm

  32. For different articulations of this criticism, see Michelle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter (London and New York: Verso, 1988); Alison Assiter, Althusser and Feminism (London: Pluto, 1990); Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Sarah Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

  33. See Firestone, p.10. I am in agreement here with Fiskin’s interpretation of Firestone on the relationship of the nuclear to the biological family.

  34. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p.10.

  35. Barrett, p.12.

  36. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1997), p.295. All subsequent references are to this edition.

  37. Jane Alpert, Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory (Pittsburgh: Know, Inc., 1974), pp.7–9, http://cdm15957.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15957coll6/id/669

  38. Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), p.90.

  39. Shulamith Firestone, Airless Spaces (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 1998), p.130.

  40. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), pp.126–9.

  41. Rick Jervis, ‘Texas’s maternal death rates top most industrialized countries,’ USA Today, 10 September 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2016/09/10/texas-maternal-mortality-rate/90115960/

  42. World Health Organization website, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs348/en/

  43. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Allen Lane, 1974), pp.347–50; Rosalind Delmar, ‘Introduction’ to Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: The Women’s Press, 1979), p.9.

  44. Penny, p.53.

  45. Hortense Spillers, Black, White and in Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp.159–64.

  46. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (London: The Women’s Press, 1982), p.181–2.

  47. See Davis, pp.70–86. See also bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp.124–31. Davis quotes Elizabeth Cady Stanton in a letter to the New York Standard in 1865, thus: ‘“as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first”’ (70). Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had campaigned against slavery, but eventually argued successfully for the dissolution of the Equal Rights Association, an alliance of white feminists and black liberationists. Firestone nonetheless uncritically groups Stanton, Anthony and black civil rights activist Sojourner Truth together as the true radicals of the first wave feminism, and named her cell of the New York Radical Feminists the ‘Stanton-Anthony Brigade.’

  48. bell hooks, Ain’t I, especially pp.136–58.

  49. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp.41–50.

  50. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986), see esp. pp.48–51, 72–82.

  51. This practice was revealed by the 1974 court case of Relf v. Weinberger. See the Southern Poverty Law Center website, https://www.splcenter.org/seeking-justice/case-docket/relf-v-weinberger

  52. O’Brien, p.79.

  53. Haraway, pp.9–10.

  54. Franklin, pp.31–2, and 45. See also, Walby, p.67; Bassett; Susanna Paasonen, ‘From Cybernation to Feminization: Firestone and Cyberfeminism,’ in Further Adventures.

  55. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester and Washington: Zer0 Books, 2009), p.33.

  56. Stevi Jackson, ‘Questioning the Foundation of Heterosexual Families,’ in Further Adventures. The Segal quotation is from: Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? (London: Virago, 1987), pp.5–6.

  57. Power, p.65–6.

  58. For example, see Alex Tabarrok for an argument against the ‘Ludit
e Fallacy – the idea that new technology destroys jobs,’ in ‘Productivity and Unemployment,’ Marginal Revolution, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/12/productivity_an.html. For an opposing view, see Paul Krugman, ‘Sympathy for the Luddites,’ The New York Times, 13 June 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html?_r=0. The argument that in the future machines will maintain machines is from Marshall Brain, Robotic Nation and Robotic Freedom (BYG Publishing, 2013).

  59. See for example, Marshall Brain, for an argument that simultaneously mounts a critique of capitalism’s wealth-concentrating operations and calls for a UBI as a way of ‘Turbo-charging’ capitalism.

  60. Heather Stewart, ‘John McDonnell: Labour taking a close look at universal basic income,’ The Guardian, 5 June 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/05/john-mcdonnell-labour-universal-basic-income-welfare-benefits-compass-report

  61. In a pilot project in Otjivero-Omitara, Namibia, in 2008–9, it was found that a Basic Income Grant (BIG) actually increased work effort and economic activity. See Claudia and Dirk Haarmann, Basic Income Grant Coalition website, http://www.bignam.org/BIG_pilot.html. In Canada in the 1970s, a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) experiment conducted among the low income population of Dauphin, Manitoba, showed that there was only a small reduction in work effort, and that this was restricted to new mothers (who elected to stay home with their newborns rather than go out to work) and to teenagers (who were relieved of pressure to support their families). See Vivian Belik, ‘A town without poverty,’ The Dominion, 5 September 2011, http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100. See also Derek Hum and Wayne Simpson, ‘A Guaranteed Annual Income? From Mincome to the Millennium,’ Policy Options, 79, January–February 2001, http://archive.irpp.org/po/archive/jan01/hum.pdf.