This piece is part of the New Statesman’s “Rereading the Second Wave” series. Read the other essays here.
It’s difficult not to think of Shulamith Firestone in Biblical terms. Partly this is a banal reflex: she was Jewish, the second child and oldest daughter in an orthodox family of six. Her name, Shulamith (originally Feuerstein, later changed to the evocative Firestone), is the original Hebrew of Salome, the tragic seductress who demanded a man’s head on a plate. Like the burning chariot of an angry, ranting prophetess, The Dialectic of Sex: A case for Feminist Revolution – Firestone’s broadside against all of the intimate institutions of society – blazed across the feminist firmament before its lessons were snuffed out by the resurgence of capitalist patriarchy and the 1980s politics of backlash.
Content from our partners
