ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses life history of Shulamith Firestone, a feminist thinker, who was one of the leading organizers and theoreticians of the US women's liberation movement of the late 1960s. The book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution was designed to serve the project of feminist revolution by mapping the structures of women's oppression, unmasking their ideological and subjective supports, and sketching an inspiring vision of a possible future. By concentrating so intently on women as a sex-class, radical feminists like Firestone taught US how to recognize gender as a legitimate theoretical category and viable locus of political struggle. The central claim of her argument is that the institution of the family, together with its various ideological reinforcements, serves as the lynchpin of the larger socioeconomic system and constitutes the locus of women's economic, psychological, and political oppression.