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Shulamith Firestone Radical Feminism An
Shulamith Firestone Radical Feminism An
SHULAMITH FIRESTONE
Radical feminism and visions of the
information society
Feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most
basic structures of our society.
(Shulamith Firestone 1970)
Although both are bound in a spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess.
(Donna Haraway 1990)
Information, Communication & Society Vol. 7, No. 1, March 2004, pp. 115–135
ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1369118042000208933
116 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y
strong. While the picture has become more complex since the 1970s, a system-
atic gender critique of society remains necessary. The gains women, at least
white middle-class women, have made make it harder to critique male domina-
tion than it was thirty years ago, but it still is important to do so. The picture
is also complex because feminist scholarship has become so diverse. There is
no single feminist standpoint on such important topics as the role of women
in an information society and the impact of technology on women. The com-
plexity and diversity of feminist scholarship often makes it difficult to determine
not only what the problems in an information age might be, but also how they
might be solved.
The information age raises questions concerning gender in the context of
computer networks and communication technology, but the questions feminists
must answer in the information age are similar to the ones feminists were
answering during the second wave feminist movement. Primarily, how is it
possible to create a society where women are treated equally to men?1 Visions
of utopian and non-sexist futures were popular during the construction of the
modern feminist movement, but these utopias have not come to pass. The
desire for gender equality continues to influence feminist writing in the
information age. As computers and technology become increasingly important
for functioning in the modern world, issues such as control over reproductive
technologies, access to cyberspace, the construction of a male-dominated tech-
nological sphere, and the need for women to claim the Internet as an important
space of their own have emerged. Underlying these issues remains the larger
problem of how it might be possible to eliminate a system of domination that
perpetuates gender inequality.
Modern information technology tends to be Janus-like. Information tech-
nology provides women with new possibilities and access to networks of power
while at the same time creating a space that perpetuates the same discrimination
experienced by women in the past (Spender 1996). While some feminists see
the Internet as allowing women to play with gendered identities, more radical
feminists suggest that information technology, and the postmodern feminist
interpretations of its libratory potential, reproduce sexism instead of tran-
scending it (Klein 1996, pp. 346–358). Despite claims that the information
age would help liberate women by creating cyberspaces where gender was no
longer an important social construction, misogyny is alive and well on the
Internet (Spender 1996, pp. 193–227).
Questioning the role technology should play in women’s lives is not a
new feminist theme. Shulamith Firestone (1970) raised questions regarding
technology in her groundbreaking radical feminist text The Dialectics of Sex.
Considered one of the twenty most influential women’s books of the past
twenty years (‘A different ‘‘sex’’ is back’ 1992), Firestone sought to develop
in The Dialectics of Sex a feminist future, using technology to free women from
the bondage created by childbirth and the patriarchal family structure. Firestone
SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 117
wrote her major work when the information society was in its earliest stages,
yet she was able to point to many of the technological innovations of the late
1960s as evidence that one day technology could liberate people from labour
and women from childbirth. While her ideas about restructuring the family
continue to sound radical today, feminist thinkers in the information age would
do well to return to Firestone for a more thorough understanding of why
contemporary information technology seems not to have achieved the type of
gender equity early feminists sought. In this paper, I examine the work of
Shulamith Firestone and her contribution to an analysis of the information age.
Firestone reconsidered
Shulamith Firestone became involved in many of the 1960s new left movements
and began working to develop a women’s movement in Chicago before moving
to New York (Gamer 1999). In New York, she was instrumental in the
formation of the women’s liberation movement, where she helped organize
the New York Radical Women, with Pam Allen, and later co-founded the
radical feminist organization the New York Redstockings, with Ellen Willis
(Humm 1992; Gamer 1999). Firestone was considered ‘intense and brilliant’,
but difficult to get along with (Gamer 1999; Jay 1999, p. 36). In addition to
direct political action, Firestone helped define the early feminist movement
through her writings. She edited the radical feminist journal Notes,2 where she
published ‘The women’s rights movement in the US: a new view’ in 1968. In
this essay, she argued that the new women’s rights movement had revolutionary
potential based upon a re-reading of the early women’s rights movement as
radical (Firestone 1968). This essay was incorporated into The Dialectics of Sex,
published two years later when Firestone was only twenty-five years old.
Ironically, Firestone had left the women’s movement by the time The
Dialectics of Sex was published, owing to personality conflicts and claims of
elitism and domination in the movement (Echols 1989, p. 195). Despite her
absence from the political scene, many considered The Dialectics of Sex to be
one of the most important works of the second-wave feminist movement. Since
its publication, excerpts have been reproduced in numerous edited volumes on
feminist theory. Notwithstanding this important position in the feminist litera-
ture, Firestone’s work, and that of most of the early radical feminists, is largely
overlooked as biologically essentialist and out of date (Richardson 1996). She
is read as important to the historical evolution of the women’s movement with
little or no contemporary relevance.
Firestone began, but never finished, a second book on images of women
in advertising (Jay 1999, p. 120). She has since written a collection of short
essays dealing with mental illness and the impact of institutionalization (Fire-
stone 1998), drawn in part from her own experiences with institutionalization.
118 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y
Firestone (1970, p. 3) begins her classic work with the claim, ‘Sex class is so
deep as to be invisible.’ This sex-class division is premised upon the biological
differences between men and women that have long been considered ‘natural’.
The radical feminist project described by Firestone was designed to challenge
and destroy categories of biological difference by initially accepting the exis-
tence of biological difference and then arguing for its elimination through
technology. As Fraser & Nicholson (1990, p. 27) point out,
Firestone drew on the pervasive tendency within modern culture to locate
the roots of gender differences in biology. Her coup was to use biologism
to establish the primacy of the struggle against male domination rather
than to justify acquiescence to it.
Firestone wished to challenge biological ‘truisms’ in an attempt to change
them.
It is this initial claim regarding the biological basis of sexism that causes
contemporary feminists to criticize Firestone as ‘essentialist and monocausal’
because she ignores the historicity of gender relationships and reduces relation-
ships to biology (Fraser & Nicholson 1990, pp. 27–28; Grant 1993, p. 25).
However, Firestone’s construction of the problem is more complex than the
critique suggests. Her project challenges the definition of what is natural
(Firestone 1970, p. 4). Firestone’s project is deconstructive; she wants to break
through the language that cements women’s roles in their biology, not repro-
duce these roles. Firestone acknowledges biological differences between men
and women as well as the existence of the biological family (man, woman,
infant), but she is unwilling to accept this framework as anything other than a
starting point. In other words, it is time humans evolved beyond their biological
conditions.
SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 119
The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist
movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction
itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter
culturally. . .. The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit
of both would be replaced by (at least the option of ) artificial reproduction:
children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either,
however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the
mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence
on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to
adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The divi-
sion of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether
(through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be
broken.
(Firestone 1970, p. 11)
There is no intrinsic reason why women (or men) must remain slaves to
biology. In fact, the links between biology and technology are at the heart of
contemporary cyberfeminism, to which Firestone seems to be a crucial pre-
cursor. However, it had only recently become possible to challenge biological
truths, as modern technology became more sophisticated (Firestone 1970,
p. 3).
Technology can be used to move beyond the ‘natural’. Writing before
widespread access to birth control and Roe v. Wade (1973), Firestone argued
that an important task for the women’s liberation movement was to seize
control of technological innovation, especially reproduction technologies and
120 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y
use them to liberate women (Firestone 1970, p. 11). It should be the goal of
the feminist movement to concentrate ‘their full energies on demands for
control of scientific discoveries by and for the people. For, like atomic energy,
fertility control, artificial reproduction, cybernation, in themselves, are liberat-
ing – unless they are improperly used’ (Firestone 1970, p.179).
Firestone covers a lot of ground in The Dialectics of Sex. She describes the
radical nature of the first American women’s movement and the backlash
against the modest gains they achieved. She deconstructs Freud and offers a
compelling feminist critique of Freud’s ideas regarding women and family
relationships. She builds an argument for why women’s liberation rests on the
destruction of the nuclear family. She critiques childhood as a socially con-
structed idea that turns children, like women, into property. She identifies
the gendered aspect of racism, the underlying patriarchal motivations behind
romantic love, and the way that men and women interpret love differently.
Throughout her analysis she identifies the problem as centred around power
and the lack of access to power for women and children. Thus, the solution
for Firestone must address the underlying powerlessness of women that has
little to do with biology and everything to do with culture.
As suggested by the title, Firestone argues that gender will be transcended
as we progress towards the ideal future. Technology is the ‘realization of the
conceivable in the actual’ (Firestone 1970, p. 162), and modern empirical
science has made achieving the ‘conceivable’ possible. The division between
what is possible and what exists, Firestone argues, ‘is generating revolutionary
forces’ (Firestone 1970, p. 171). As a result, an economic and cultural revolu-
tion is possible, but only if it is ‘predicated on the elimination of the (sex)
dualism’ (Firestone 1970, p. 171). Firestone’s vision of the future recognizes
the malleability of gender and claims that only by transcending the dualistic
tendencies inherent in gender can we achieve liberation. Her future is androgyn-
ous made possible through technology.
While her goal is a future where gender categories are exploded, she does
not discount the possibility of transexuality as the norm (Firestone 1970, pp.
53–54). Firestone envisions the possibility of all possible sexual combinations.
She continues:
All other things being equal, people might still prefer those of the opposite
sex simply because it is physically more convenient. But even this is a large
assumption. For if sexuality were indeed at no time separated from other
responses, if one individual responded to the other in a total way that
merely included sexuality as one of its components, then it is unlikely that
a purely physical factor could be decisive. However, we have no way of
knowing that now.
(Firestone 1970, p. 54)
SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 121
only where they reinforced and furthered present values of family life and
reproduction, e.g., to help a barren woman have her husband’s child. Any
question that could be interpreted as a furthering of liberation per se was
rejected flatly as unnatural.
(Firestone 1970, pp. 179–180)
double course that man should till the soil by the sweat of his brow and
that woman should bear in pain and travail would be lifted through techno-
logy to make humane living for the first time a possibility. The feminist
movement has the essential mission of creating cultural acceptance of the
new ecological balance necessary for the survival of the human race in the
twentieth century.
(Firestone 1970, p. 184)
It is important, that an ‘add women and stir’ approach is not taken to the
upcoming technological and cultural revolution. The underlying power struc-
ture based on gender must be dismantled. To ignore the necessity of gender
transformation is to enter a failed social experiment.
Instead of the humanistic, and egalitarian future envisioned by Firestone,
‘the drafting of women into a male world, rather than the elimination of sex
class distinction’ causes a dystopian future
Her call to transcend gender and construct an androgynous future seems equally
salient and certainly compatible with Haraway’s cyborg future. Furthermore,
her critique of technology combined with her understanding of its’ libratory
potential continues to be an important theme for feminist discussion. Finally,
the second-wave feminist focus on political activism should be retrieved within
the information society. Thus, Firestone can make an important contribution
to our understanding of the information society, and I would like to examine
her work further in relation to contemporary feminists who have taken up
technology and cyberspace as important avenues for feminist analysis.
Perhaps an important question that begs to be asked thirty years after the pub-
lication of The Dialectics of Sex is: why has technology not led to the transforma-
tions Firestone wanted? I would like to address two aspects of the information
age important to feminism and link them through the theme of the body. The
body has long been of interest to feminists as the site from which oppression
emerges. Firestone discusses reproductive technologies and the importance of
controlling these technologies because in her view, women’s oppression is
centred on control of women’s bodies. This theorizing of the body has changed
along with evolving technology. However, the body continues to be an important
theme in contemporary assessments of the information age. Contemporary fem-
inists are interested in hybrid bodies, becoming disembodied through the con-
struction of identity on the Internet, and exploitation of women’s bodies both
real and virtual (rape in cyberspace etc.). Thus, despite the seemingly disembod-
ied world of the Internet, a central theme that continues to be relevant is the
role played by women’s bodies. In investigating the information society, I will
look at the role technology plays in the everyday lives of women, especially
reproductive technologies and the ways in which feminist analyse the Internet.
Firestone did not suggest that the process of transcending gender was
inevitable; rather, she argued such a transformation is possible through political
struggle on the part of women. Mainstream second-wave feminists marginalized
the radical feminists during the politically tumultuous 1970s. Just as voting
rights became the central focus of the first-wave feminist movement in an
effort to build consensus between radical and conservative feminists, so too
did educational and employment issues become central to the second-wave
feminists at the expense of the more far-reaching structural and social critiques
advocated by the radical feminists. While liberal feminists were successful in
creating new opportunities for women, all feminists suffered from the inevitable
backlash documented by Susan Faludi (1991).
Throughout the eighties and nineties, feminists continued to be concerned
with scientific and technological issues. The success of the women’s movement
124 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y
Thus, the issue of reproduction and technology must re-centre itself upon the
bodies of women and the ways their bodies are appropriated into the romantic
language of motherhood. It is important to recognize, as J. Halberstam (1991,
p. 439) puts it, that ‘femininity is always mechanical and artificial – as is
masculinity’. Firestone recognizes that, given the current balance of power,
‘there is no doubt that the machine could be used – is being used – to intensify
the apparatus of repression and to increase established power’ (Firestone 1970,
p. 182). This repression is taking place both within the arena of reproduction,
but also within society more generally. Recognizing the way power works
through technology to eliminate women’s choices regarding motherhood is
important to understanding how to rebuild technology as a revolutionary force.
Firestone recognizes that technology alone will not liberate women and
men, instead there must be a transformation in the way sex-roles are under-
stood, a transformation that can only take place if technology is used to give
women choices other than childbearing. As Franklin (1998) points out:
The Dialectic of Sex still offers us a valuable critique of the kinds of cultural
values that brought us IVF, ICSI, PID, genetic engineering and Dolly the
Sheep. These techniques are not immaculate conceptions of the petri dish:
they are born of the desires and hopes of the scientists who invent them,
the clinicians who use them, the patients who ask for them, the institutions
which fund their development, the laws that legalize them, the media that
reports on them, and so forth. Above all, they are born from the ways in
which reproduction is defined and controlled in our time. And at the end
of the twentieth century, that turns out to be pretty much the same as
ever: technology or no technology.
domination and instead to insist, often vocally and aggressively, that men are
being ‘silenced’ by women (Spender 1996, pp. 193–194). She notes, ‘terms
such as domineering, bitch, bossy, and castrating have all been used to describe
women who take up more than 30 per cent of the conversation space’ (Spender
1996, p. 193). Additionally, men often intervene on women’s discussion groups
to post abusive and sexually explicit comments (Spender 1996, p. 196), a
behaviour interpreted as harassment designed to better define the Internet as
male turf. Women who complain about the aggressive language on the net are
told that they should toughen up and get used to it, or ‘stay out of the kitchen’.
(Spender 1996, p. 197). Spender concludes (1996, p. 198), ‘Despite the
enormous potential of the net to be a network – to promote egalitarian,
cooperative communication exchanges – the virtual reality is one where aggres-
sion, intimidation and plain macho-mode prevail.’
Other feminist scholars identify the numerous ways in which the Internet
facilitates the exploitation of women and children (Gillespie 2000). Mail-order
brides and babies have become commonplace with the help of the Internet
(Jewkes 2003). Pornography is a popular use of new communications techno-
logy, and the Internet has allowed previously marginalized and deviant groups
to connect with each other, thus eliminating some of the social stigma deviance
attaches to their activities (Sharp & Earle 2003). Finally, hacker culture remains
predominantly male if not outright misogynist (Taylor 2003). The Internet,
rather than a radically new mode of communication, can perpetuate the sexism
that exists in the ‘real’ world and facilitates the trade of women’s bodies (both
real and virtual) in a more efficient manner.
The world of women on the Internet is not completely bleak. Feminist
scholars are developing work on why women matter on the Internet (Consaluo
& Paasonen 2002) and there is evidence that women’s participation on the
Internet has grown, thus eliminating some concerns about access (Bowker &
Liu 2001). Women are using information technology to create women’s net-
works online (Burke 1999; Sherman 2001). Additionally, many women are
resisting the male domination of cyberspace by creating empowering interna-
tional networks for women (Harcourt 2000). Shade (2002) argues that the
Internet is to third-wave feminists what independent feminist presses were to
the second wave. Thus, for many cyberfeminists, female networks are an act
of resistance to a relatively male-dominated network.
The liberal feminist concerns regarding the Internet are important and
highlight the lack of options open for women. Women today, much like thirty
years ago, continue to be bound by their gender, and the existence of an
underlying male domination remains a concern. While it may be the case that
gender can be flexible online, one’s online life is much easier if you are male.
Firestone would most likely wish for cyberfeminists to go further. The creation
of all-women’s networks may result in the development of a parallel space for
women, but will perhaps stop short of creating a post-gendered world.
128 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y
Plant’s project is utopian and Hegelian, where the ultimate outcome will be a
feminine network that has rendered men powerless (Plant 1996a, p. 182). For
Plant, the Internet is a space women should control and inevitably will control.
She argues that the communication technology of the Internet is designed with
women’s ways of communicating rather than men’s in mind. As Plant points
out, ‘the notion that it is all masculine is a convenient myth sustained by the
present power structures’ (quoted in Spender 1996, p. 229). Plant suggests
that:
One of the problems with this utopia, where all women think of themselves
as cyborgs and are able to cruise the Web in conscious and subversive ways,
SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 131
90s cyberfeminist revolutions are about forming spaces for women’s net-
works, producing content alternative to that of the malestream, and
empowering women as cultural producers and user[s] of technology. These
networks have no fixed centers and they do not aim at subverting the
socio-economic order, or imagining future societies – they function at the
level of the ‘micro’ rather than ‘macro.’ Few believe in the possibilities of
a socialist feminist revolution, but on the level of the personal as political,
dreams of change prevail.
Firestone would most likely believe that this relatively small resistance is not
enough. However, it may be possible to evaluate the creation of women’s spaces
132 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y
on the Internet as a crucial first step towards some sort of dialectical progress à
la Firestone. Perhaps Firestone’s revolution was not possible because the femin-
ine side of the dialectic was so atrophied as to be wholly discounted. Addition-
ally, as the second-wave feminists were submerged under the backlash, issues
became less clear cut and women settled for the gains they had made. Perhaps it
is possible to assert some sort of women’s way of talking on the net that could
culminate in the transformation of gender in the ways Firestone sought.
To be sure, there are costs and benefits to the androgynous future described
by Firestone. However, given the critique of the nuclear family and the severe
dysfunction that Firestone claims results from this type of family relationship,
the transcendence of gender relations seems a favourable alternative. Addition-
ally, a post-gender revolution would only be possible under conditions of
gender equality; thus, what might be lost in terms of unique gender character-
istics (especially those values feminists privilege as feminine) would ultimately
be gained by everyone. While only a small slice of life, the Internet may serve
as an excellent experimental space for androgynous communication.
The information age and the technologies that are changing our lives
have not successfully facilitated a feminist transformation, in part because the
underlying system remains stable. Certainly, women’s gains in the past few
decades have been significant, but they have remained confined to the liberal
feminist agenda of access to the world primarily on male terms. This type of
access has been reproduced online where similar gender divisions remain clearly
drawn. Perhaps it is time for women to rethink their political alternatives. The
radical feminists of the late sixties and early seventies were often perceived as
radical because they sought to clarify the hidden assumptions upon which social
structures rested. They didn’t simply write about these problems: they publicly
protested and engaged in direct action to ‘raise consciousness’. However,
feminist scholarship has moved far from its activist roots. I’m not sure what a
feminist political movement for the information society might look like, perhaps
not much different from the initial movement. However, it seems important
that a movement that goes beyond theory into action takes place.
We can place hope in a feminist vision of the future, however that future
may be conceptualized. The future may see gender relations through the lens
of androgyny, the cyborg, or as a network; but realize that the future takes
action, a revolution in Firestone’s words, and such a revolution will rock the
boat of the small gains made by liberal feminists. However, if there is the
possibility of such a future, then it is one where the politics of the information
age must be defined in revolutionary terms.
Notes
1 Of course this question oversimplifies the issue. Questions of equality versus
difference abound in the feminist literature and ways in which identity has
SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 133
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