Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone (born 1945) is a Jewish Canadian-born feminist.

Sourced

The Dialectic of Sex, publ. The Women's Press, 1979

• 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!' - is the closest to the truth.

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

• 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.

Unsourced

• 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.

• Freudianism has become, with its confessionals and penance, its proselytes and converts, with the millions spent on its upkeep, our modern Church.

• Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.

• The end goal of the feminist revolution is the elimination of the sex distinction itself.

• Pregnancy is barbaric, and childbirth hurts... like shitting a pumpkin.