Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, William Morrow & Company, 1970; Verso, 2015; £5.00 pbk.
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RATING: 95
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Shulamith Firestone wrote The Dialectic of Sex over a period of five months, in her mid-twenties, while playing a leading role in New York in the Women's Liberation Movement and the rapidly shifting groups, organizations and initiatives through which it advanced (Echols, 2007: 152). Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Not long after, she withdrew from political activity. You can learn something of her subsequent life, and the circumstances of her death in 2012, from her own Airless Spaces (1998), and Susan Faludi's very affecting 'Death of a Revolutionary' (2013). It is far and away the most brilliant text of 'second wave' feminism, and with its focus on artificial reproduction and the replacement of human productive labour by artificial intelligence and machines, the most relevant today. Not only that, but it is full of pithy and arresting phrases and concepts - pregnancy is barbaric, childhood is hell, child-as-project, a-baby-all-your-own-to-fuck-up-as-you-please, the personal is political, the smile boycott, universal minimum income - and it is both adventurous and funny (something nobody tells you) and so a delight to read. If you doubt this, imagine the passage that runs from 'Pregnancy is barbaric' through to 'Well, that's something, she says, but how do I know it will be male like you?' (198-9) as a routine on the comedy circuit. As fresh today as the day it was written. More generally, the best way to approach the text is to recognize that Firestone not only speaks clearly and means what she says, but also fearlessly and rigorously follows the implications of her argument, with remorseless logic, and without the slightest regard for social convention. The resulting text is extraordinary, and incidentally full of insights on an enormous range of topics on which I won't have the space to expand, from the limitations of the Bauhaus or the art of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt (she had studied Fine Art, after all) to the limited extent to which kibbutz life challenges gender and related stereotypes, the pressures on girls and young women to conform to patriarchal and capitalist norms, the double-edged implications of the provision of child care and of 'wages for housework', and much more besides. Despite all this, the book has had a chequered history: it has been denounced as being shot through with biological fundamentalism, technological determinism, and pernicious heteronormativity, neglected for long periods of time, and intermittently out of print. But there are currently signs of a long overdue positive reappraisal, and as Verso has had it in print since 2015 and is offering it for only £5, there couldn't be a better time to get to know it, or renew your acquaintance with it.
So to its chequered history. Stella Sandford, who came across a copy for a pound in a bargain bin in North London in 2006, comments that: 'Like many other students of the history of feminism (my formal feminist education began in the late 1980s) all I knew of Firestone was that she argued for the abolition of biological reproduction, as the necessary condition for freeing women from the natural basis of their oppression. This was why, I presumed, she was consigned to the bargain bin. I had never read The Dialectic of Sex, of course' (Sandford, 2010: 235). Her sense of the book at that point is understandable. For Donna Haraway, despite her immense importance to feminists, Firestone 'made the basic mistake of reducing social relations to natural objects ... [t]hat is, she accepted that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations' (Haraway, 1978, 24-5). For Michèle Barrett, she saw the 'biological family' as a natural entity of which the nuclear family was the most recent manifestation, and invoked 'an apparently universal and trans-historical category of male dominance, leaving us with little hope of change' (Barrett, 1980, 12 and 195-7). For Christine Delphy, she was 'outrageously biologistic' (Delphy, [1981] 2016: 143), and for Mary O'Brien (1981:79) she was guilty of 'genderic determinism'. Sandford's first critical response once she read the book was ambivalent. She found aspects of it 'surprisingly perhaps, instructive as a way into the contemporary debate about "sex"' (Sandford, 2007: 28), but described her category of the biological family as 'at best an ill-chosen metaphor, at worst a vicious contradiction in terms' (ibid: 30), and concluded that she 'foregrounds sex in an analysis that seems not to recognize a distinction between sex and gender' (ibid: 30-31). Three years later, though, while she still regarded her as wrong on some fundamental issues, she offered a more nuanced reading, reflected in a distinct shift in tone. 'Why', she began by asking, 'did the history of feminism effectively erase the fact that one of the main aims of Firestone’s radical feminism was to “attack sex distinctions themselves”?', and she identified 'a failure to appreciate her implicit attempt to specify a conception of sex such that it could be posited as the basis for women's oppression without being the basis for the justification of its continuation' (Sandford, 2010: 235, paraphrasing rather than citing Firestone, p. 16; see also pp. 239-40). In 2015 Kathi Weeks pushed a little further, proposing to read The Dialectic of Sex as a 'utopian manifesto', and suggesting a number of ways of interpreting its insistence that the oppression of women is grounded in nature, in that 'the gender division of both productive and reproductive labor is fundamental to the sex class system, and ... the division of labor is founded on biological reproduction' (Weeks, 2015: 738). She first considered but questioned the idea that she simply confuses the social for the biological, then entertained the thought that 'one could just as easily read Firestone’s claim as a smart political tactic: instead of swimming against the tide, she first accepts the argument that inequality is natural and then pulls the rug out from under it by characterizing it as a historical argument irrelevant to the future. Then she went on,
'While I am sympathetic to both of those readings of Firestone’s argument about the natural foundation of women’s oppression, there is a third interpretation to consider as well. This one reads the assertion in the context of the utopian manifesto, a genre with its own reading protocols. For example, we can reinterpret the claim about the biological basis of gender oppression in relation to the two key functions of the generic form. The first of these is critical, to use the possibility of a better future to shed light on and raise questions about the present. From this perspective, the implication of Firestone’s argument, namely, that it may be more realistic and politically feasible to eliminate the biological division of reproductive labor than the social one, is thought provoking, to say the least. The argument invites us to consider whether the plasticity of gender makes it in some ways a more elusive target than the rather simple and innocent notion of “nature” that undergirds the antifeminist analysis. Rather than a capitulation to biological essentialism, the argument could be seen as the ultimate, because so literal, example of feminist denaturalization' (Weeks, 2015: 739; emphasis mine).
Then in 2018 we find Lisa Downing reading Firestone in parallel with her 'shadow sister' Monique Wittig, rather than in contrast to her, as a 'proto-queer theorist': the discourse and logic employed by Firestone are 'queer along the lines of Michael Warner's post-Foucauldian definition of queer as that which provides "resistance to regimes of the normal"' (Downing, 2018: 368, citing Warner, 1993: xxvii). I haven't managed to read the recent monograph by Victoria Margree (2018), but it looks also to be strongly revisionist, and a contribution of hers that I have seen identifies Firestone as a 'xenofeminist before her time' (Margree, 2019). All in all, the significance of the text is wide open for debate.
Against this background, my focus is fairly narrow. As always, my first objective is to encourage you to read, or re-read, what is a solid gold classic text. Second, I argue that it has been misread: it is not biologically fundamentalist, technologically determinist, or heteronormative. In fact, it doesn't even require the adoption of artificial means of human reproduction. Beyond that, I offer you a new reading that is deliberately one-sided. Firestone followed Simone de Beauvoir in structuring her approach around a critical appropriation of both Marx and Freud, and took the position that 'beneath economics reality is psycho-social' (5). First, her recourse to Freud adds nothing; and it misfires badly in relation to race, in a chapter that nobody finds satisfactory. So as her materialist account of the origins, maintenance and reinforcement of the 'sex class' system stands up perfectly well if all reference to Freud is set aside, I disregard Freud, and attend only to the historical materialist analysis derived critically from Marx and Engels. Second, the priority she accords to the psychosocial leads to a lacuna in her approach to capitalism. She insists throughout that capitalism must be overthrown: 'We shall need a sexual revolution much larger than - inclusive of - a socialist one to truly eradicate all class systems' (12). Yet at the same time she replaces Engels' claim that 'the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period' with one that formally denies that capitalism has any other source or dynamic than that stemming from the psycho-social, and the 'sex class' system: 'The sexual-reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period' (13). She has no need to argue that the origins of capitalism lie in the sexual-reproductive organization of society, and she makes no serious attempt to do so. But by failing to integrate the specific dynamics of capitalist exploitation into her account of historical change, she leaves entirely obscure the relationship between the sex class and socialist revolutions. So Martha Gimenez is correct to argue that Firestone offers a 'theoretical analysis of sexism in isolation from modes of production' that is 'tantamount to separating men and women from their historical conditions of existence', although mistaken, in my view, as others are, in seeing Firestone's overall analysis of the oppression of women as resting 'upon biological and technological determinism and, as such .. inherently conservative in its theoretical assumptions and political implications' (Gimenez, 2018: 68, 174). The position I will defend is that while Firestone clearly saw herself as adopting the analytical method of Marx and Engels, and both building upon and deviating from the substantive analysis they produced, there is an apparently minor but very significant lapse in her application of that method which if corrected leads to a quite different picture: she emerges as a pioneering innovator who clears the path towards a development of Marxist theory, and an integration of Marxist and gender perspectives on equal, and equally historical materialist terms.
So, to begin at the beginning, Firestone prefaces the text with an epigraph that is anything but fundamentalist or essentialist - Engels' evocation of the 'primitive, naive, but intrinsically correct conception of the world' formulated by Heraclitus, that 'everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, coming into being and passing away'. This denies any fixed content to nature along with everything else, and seems an odd way to situate an argument whose final appeal will be to biological fundamentalism. Then the opening lines of the book immediately problematize the idea of sex as a 'fundamental biological condition', or as beyond change. First, she states that 'Sex class is so deep as to be invisible' (emphasis mine). 'Sex class', not 'sex' - we are immediately in the realm of the social. Second, she invokes the contrasting perspective of a reformist or liberal approach to women's liberation, which misses this in judging by surface appearances: '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 workforce'. But it can't. Third, then, she imagines the reaction to the suggestion that 'sex class' itself could be changed: '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. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that'. Fourth, it is in response to this that the idea of a fundamental biological condition appears: 'This gut reaction - the assumption that, even when they don't know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition - is an honest one'. The idea of a fundamental biological condition that cannot be changed is not the standpoint that Firestone herself adopts. It is introduced as pertaining to a view honestly held by the 'common man, woman and child', that leads them to believe in turn that deep-seated 'sex class' cannot be changed. And fifth, she acknowledges that we barely have the language to address the depth and scope of the change she imagines: 'That so profound a change cannot be easily fit into traditional categories of thought, e.g., "political", is not because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it' (1).
So runs the very first paragraph of the book, in full. The sentence that follows acknowledges the apparent common sense behind the prevailing gut reaction, but suggests at the same time that it is mistaken, as what once appeared as a fundamental and unalterable biological condition can now be questioned: 'Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity'. Yet the social, institutional and cultural obstacles are formidable: 'The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer. ... Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the organization of nature. ... For we are dealing with ... an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself' (2).
Feminists, then, must question 'the organization of nature', and first Marx and Engels, then Simone de Beauvoir, point the way. So, turning to the manner in which she will address this issue, Firestone invokes the dialectical and materialist analytic method of Marx and Engels (a method already reflected in her opening comments on the contrast between surface appearances and depth). Where previous socialist thinkers had been able to do no more than moralize about existing social inequalities, so that 'their ideas existed in a cultural vacuum, utopian',
'Marx and Engels ... attempted a scientific approach to history. They traced the class conflict to its real economic origins, projecting an economic solution based on objective economic conditions already present: the seizure by the proletariat of the means of production would lead to a communism in which government had withered away, no longer needed to repress the lower class for the sake of the higher. In the classless society the interests of every individual would be synonymous with those of the larger society' (3).
However, the doctrine of historical materialism 'much as it was a brilliant advance over previous historical analysis, was not the complete answer, as later events bore out' (3). It was partial (her emphasis, p. 4), because it stopped at class struggle. Engels did better than Marx (observing inter alia that 'the original division of labour was between man and woman for the purposes of child-breeding') but while Engels 'at times dimly perceives' a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic, 'because he can see sexuality only through an economic filter, reducing everything to that, he is unable to evaluate it in its own right' (4). So as Firestone sets out to develop 'a materialist view of history based on sex itself' (5) she turns to the only early feminist to avoid 'skimming the surface', Simone de Beauvoir. She is 'the only one who came close to - who perhaps has done - the definitive analysis'; but at the same time she is 'almost too sophisticated', in giving priority to 'the sign of duality which is not in the first place sexual in character', when she might have 'seriously considered the much simpler and more likely possibility that this fundamental dualism sprang from the sexual division itself' (7). Three steps in the argument follow, and they must be taken together. First, via a critique of De Beauvoir, Firestone identifies procreation as the focus of her analysis:
'Before assuming such categories [as 'Otherness', 'Transendence', and 'Immanence'], let us first try to develop an analysis in which biology itself - procreation - is at the origin of the dualism. The immediate assumption of the layman that the unequal division of the sexes is "natural" may be well-founded. We need not immediately look beyond this. Unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equally privileged. Although, as Beauvoir points out, this difference of itself did not necessitate the development of a class system - the domination of one group by another - the reproductive functions of these differences did' (8).
Second, and immediately following, she introduces the 'biological family' ('the basic reproductive unit of male/female/infant, in whatever form of social organization) as 'an inherently unequal power distribution', characterized by [four] fundamental - if not immutable - facts': that women throughout history before the advent of birth control were 'at the continual mercy of their biology', and 'dependent on males ... for physical survival'; that 'human infants take an even longer time to grow up than animals, and thus are helpless and for a short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival'; 'that a basic mother/child interdependency has existed in some form in every society, past or present, and thus has shaped the psychology of every mature female and every infant'; and that 'the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labour at the origins of class, as well as furnishing the paradigm of caste (discrimination based on biological characteristics)' (8-9).
But third, having apparently painted herself into a deterministic corner, she stipulates
'But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the Kingdom of Nature does not reign absolute. As Simone de Beauvoir herself admits [citing the opening lines of Chapter 3 of The Second Sex, on 'The Point of View of Historical Materialism']:
'The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some most important truths. Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis – in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action'.
Firestone develops her argument step by step. I suggest that the whole passage has to be read in the light of the third step above, which insists with De Beauvoir that humanity is not an animal species, but a historical reality. I interpret it as follows: there is an irreducible natural or biological aspect to procreation, or there has been at least for much of human history. But even so, human procreation is not an exclusively natural act, by virtue of the fact that humanity is not an animal species. It is at the same time a social act, to which De Beauvoir's point that human society does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over control of nature on its own behalf through practical action applies. The biological family, in turn, is not natural at all, in Firestone's framework, but an entirely human social institution (and this also recalls Marx and Engels, in the German Ideology, on the family as 'to begin with ... the only social relation' - Collected Works, Vol. 5, p 43), and one that is maintained and reinforced by cultural institutions (13). Recalcitrant as available language may be, Firestone strives for precision. So with 'fundamental - if not immutable': the fact that human infants are 'for a short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival' is immutable, and she wants this period of helpless dependence to be as short as possible. The others are not, and she proposes alternative social arrangements that problematize the concept of the biological family and amount to its abolition as a social form. So while 'the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labour at the origins of class', and the resulting unequal distribution of power initially enabled men to make the biological family unit the cornerstone of the sex class system, subsequent technological advances - in control of fertility and potentially in artificial reproduction - mean that women have it in their hands to challenge and overthrow the 'sex class' system.
In short, De Beauvoir's insistence that human society does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf, and that this 'arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action' captures Firestone's politics precisely. Immediately following its introduction, she goes on to say:
'Thus, the "natural" is not necessarily a "human" value. Humanity has begin to outgrow nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in Nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it. ... The problem becomes political, demanding more than a comprehensive historical analysis, when one realizes that, though man is increasingly capable of freeing himself from the biological conditions that created his tyranny over women and children, he has little reason to want to give this up. [And now following Engels] Though the sex class system may have originated in fundamental biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological basis of their oppression has been swept away that women and children will be freed. On the contrary, the new technology, especially fertility control, may be used against them to reinforce the entrenched system of exploitation. So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility - the new population biology as well as all the institutions of childbearing and childrearing' (10-11).
To state the obvious, Firestone models her account of 'sex class' on the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that Marx and Engels saw as central. She is no more a technological determinist than she is a biological determinist. The line of argument, rather, is that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of (sex) class struggles':
'And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so 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' (11).
So where Marx foretold the end of capitalist private property:
'As soon as this metamorphosis has sufficiently decomposed the old society throughout its depth and breadth, as soon as the workers have been turned into proletarians, and their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialization of labour and the further transformation of the soil and other means of production into socially exploited and therefore communal means of production takes on a new form ... The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they are incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated' (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin, 1976, pp. 928-9),
Firestone proclaims the end of the biological family:
'The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of the other 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 division of labour would be ended by by the elimination of labour altogether (cybernation). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken'.
And she concludes the chapter as noted above by adapting Engels' definition of historical materialism from Socialism: Utopian or Scientific to make 'the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another' the 'ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events', even venturing that the 'sexual-reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period' (12, 13).
In short, sex class is made possible by or grounded on the unequal division of labour in procreation, but it is instituted by the exercise of 'class' power and sustained by social institutions and ideologies - by the nuclear family as the current form of the biological family, and the ruling ideology of the dominant sex class erected upon it - a construction that pictures two genders, with complementary social roles (male breadwinner, female child-rearer and housewife), and characteristics that are proclaimed to be 'natural'. Firestone's explicit point, shared with Simone de Beauvoir, is that none of this is entailed by the process of procreation itself. It is worth noting in this respect that the word 'nature' appears in three forms in the text, as in the sentence 'Thus, the "natural" is not necessarily a "human" value. Humanity has begin to outgrow nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in Nature': my sense is that Firestone is fairly consistent in writing it without punctuation when she uses it neutrally, in scare quotes ("nature") when she uses it to mean both natural and social, and with a capital N (Nature) when it is deployed within the dominant ideology as a determining force.
Firestone does hold, then, that the sexual imbalance of power reflected in 'sex class' is biologically based, in the specific sense of being originally rooted in the division of labour in the material process of procreation. Delphy, it is worth recalling, would similarly recognize 'procreational functional differences between individuals' (1993: 5), before going on to challenge the link between those differences and the way in which a given society represents 'biology' to itself - especially when the error is committed of assuming that 'it is self-evident that there are two, and only two, sexes, and that this dichotomy exactly cross-checks with the division between potential bearers and non-bearers of children'.
Firestone is just as adamant that both the biological/nuclear family and gender itself are socially constructed. 'To make both women and children totally independent', she remarks later, 'would be to eliminate not just the patriarchal nuclear family, but the biological family itself' (48). And, again on the patriarchal nuclear family: 'even its short history, roughly from the fourteenth century on, is revealing: the growth of our most cherished family values was contingent on cultural conditions, its foundations in no sense absolute' (75). And on gender roles, she initially describes the 'radical feminist view' as aiming to overthrow 'the class system based on sex - a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles an undeserving legitimacy and seeming permanence' (14). The focus on roles - and specifically roles prescribed by the prevailing sex class system, the manner in which they are enforced, and the means by which they can be challenged - continues throughout. It starts with a bleak assessment of situation in 1970, after the 'fifty-year ridicule' of the earlier radical women's movements: 'By 1970 the rebellious daughters of this wasted generation no longer, for practical purposes, even knew there had been a feminist movement', and in the meantime, 'The cultural indoctrinations necessary to reinforce sex role traditions had become blatant, tasteless, where before they had been insidious' (30, emphasis mine). 'Femininity' and 'masculinity' are just as socially constructed. So when she remarks that a young girl 'rejects everything identified with her mother, i.e. servility and wiles, the psychology of the oppressed, and imitates everything she has seen her brother do that gains for him the kind of freedom and approval she is seeking', she immediately adds in parentheses '(Notice I do not say she pretends masculinity. These traits are not sexually determined)' (53). Later, she remarks that 'Freudianism was gradually revised to suit the pragmatic needs of clinical therapy: it became an applied science complete with white-coated technicians, its contents subverted for a reactionary end - the socialization of men and women in an artificial sex-role system' (70). The chapter 'Down With Childhood!' builds on the assertion that 'The heart of women's oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles. And in turn children are defined in relation to this role and are psychologically formed by it; what they become as adults and the sorts of relationships they are able to form determine the society they will ultimately build' (72). Firestone's account of the gradual separation of childhood from adulthood and boys from girls by social, institutional and cultural innovations notes specifically how these differentiations eventually become "natural": 'In each case a physical difference [was] enlarged culturally with the help of special dress, education, manners, and activity until this cultural reinforcement itself began to appear "natural", even instinctive, an exaggeration process that enables easy stereotyping: the individual eventually appears to be a different kind of human animal with its own peculiar set of laws and behaviour' (89). This is the context in which Firestone introduces her own experience, and demonstrates both her acute awareness that gender is politically constructed, and her political response. What is at stake when a child or woman does not play her expected role and 'smile as she should', thereby indicating acquiescence to her own oppression? She tells us:
'In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My "dream" action for the women's liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their "pleasing" smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them' (90).
Kathi Weeks describes this notion as 'amusing' (Weeks, 2015: 737), but it is clearly much more than that. It confirms that Firestone was every bit as aware as anyone that gender was socially constructed, remorselessly, every day, and that women were constantly at risk of reinforcing their own oppression.
Finally, there is no better case for regarding Firestone's stance as heteronormative. She expresses the view almost casually, in passing, that Freud's account of the 'Electra Complex' 'incidentally, disproves a biological heterosexuality' (52). The discussion that follows suffers from her attempt to advance her argument in the context of Freud and the incest taboo, and there is plenty in passing that appears to denigrate homosexuality and lesbianism (these being the terms she uses). But it transpires as she completes the argument that she regards heterosexuality as just as limited and 'obstructed' a form of sexuality, and looks forwards to it withering away:
'Thus we see that in a family-based society, repressions due to the incest taboo make a totally fulfilled sexuality impossible for anyone, and a well-functioning sexuality possible for only a few. Homosexuals in our time are only the extreme casualties of the system of obstructed sexuality that develops in the family. But though homosexuality at present is as limited and sick as our heterosexuality, a day may soon come in which a healthy transsexuality would be the norm. For if we grant that the sexual drive is at birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the total personality (Freud's "polymorphous perversity") and, as we have seen, becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo; and that, furthermore, the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family; then if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with the repressions that mould sexuality into specific formations. 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' (59).
I'm not suggesting here, at all, that the argument is well made. But it is beyond dispute that Firestone regards heteronormativity as an ideological construction associated with the sex class system and the patriarchal nuclear family, and rejects it.
Similar example abound in subsequent chapters, but this review is long enough already, and I have further to go. After a very brief reference to the conclusion, therefore, I return finally to Firestone's relationship to classical Marxism. The point to be highlighted is that Firestone's analysis continues to be political, rather than biologically or technologically determinist, as best reflected in her response to the possible consequences if the patriarchal nuclear family is replaced by a new system of households with shared responsibility for a number of children. Speculating that it might turn out that there is no 'instinct' for pregnancy, and that in changed social circumstances women might no longer want to "have" children at all, she is characteristically brisk: 'Might this not be a disaster, given that artificial reproduction is not yet perfected? But women have no special reproductive obligation to the species. If they are no longer willing, then artificial methods will have to be developed hurriedly, or, at the very least, satisfactory compensations - other than destructive ego investments - would have to be supplied to make it worth their while' (233; cf. 238). Note in passing that this rules out 'having a baby of your own', pointing instead in the direction of social surrogacy. Principally, though, Firestone's insistence that women have no special reproductive obligation to the species captures the politics of The Dialectic of Sex far more than does a reference out of context to artificial reproduction. Along the same lines, her closing reference to the possibility that in the future pregnancy 'would be indulged in, if at all, only as a tongue-in-cheek archaism' (241) is a specific reflection of a time when such a choice would no longer have any further implications for gender roles or relations, but simply be the free choice of an individual.
Firestone's principal target, it turns out, is the social structure of the biological or patriarchal nuclear family, and the sex class system built around it. The difference between Firestone and those who argue for the socially constructed character of gender, sex, woman is not that she disagrees with those arguments. It is that she rejects as wishful thinking the notion that the oppression of women of which these social constructions are a constitutive part can be challenged by discursive fiat, rather than by overthrowing the social structures at their root. So although Firestone was not mentioned at any point in the article in question, Delphy's comment applies: ''All feminists reject the sex/gender hierarchy, but very few are ready to admit that the logical consequence of this rejection is a refusal of sex roles, and the disappearance of gender. ... Very few indeed are happy to contemplate there being simple anatomical sexual differences which are not given any social significance or symbolic value' (Delphy, 1993: 6). This was Firestone's whole agenda.
Finally, then, although critical commentaries on Firestone, including those referenced above, have generally skated very lightly over her adoption of a Marxist method of analysis, it runs deep. As noted above, she accepts entirely Marx's critique of capitalism, and the need for a socialist revolution, though without fully integrating it into her analysis. But she equally charges Marx and Engels with failing to get to the heart of sex class oppression, and, like many others, argues that the classical Marxist framework needs to be supplemented or even fundamentally reworked as a consequence. In conclusion, I will suggest that this is not necessarily so, and that Firestone herself had already identified the reason why.
As noted above, she stated right at the start that 'Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity'. And she adds later that 'Marx could not take fully into account the future advent of cybernetics' (60). Precisely so. Neither Marx nor Engels lived to see the twentieth-century advances that allowed women enhanced control over their own fertility, let alone the prospect of artificial reproduction, though they did anticipate a world changed by revolutionary forms of machine. But they argued from the start that what men and women are ‘coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce’; that this focus on production included ‘the production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation’; and that the family within which they propagated their kind was to be understood ‘in relation to the history of industry and exchange’ (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, Vol. 5, 2010: 31-2, 43). And their analytical method was underpinned by the assumption that in bourgeois society, where capital is dominant, it assigns rank and influence to other modes of production, which at the same time appear to it as barriers to overcome: it seeks ‘to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive from its standpoint’ (Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973: 106-107, 408). And in Capital, finally, Marx identified the tendency, in industrial capitalism, for the 'modern science of technology' to dissolve the 'varied, apparently unconnected and petrified forms of the social production process' into 'conscious and planned applications of natural science' (Marx, Capital, Penguin, 1976: 616-7). So Firestone's historical materialist account of the 'dialectic of sex' may do more to confirm the power of the analytical framework produced by Marx and Engels than she was able to see. But by the same token, it also makes her a pioneer in the analysis of its implications for the production of fresh life in procreation once advances in science brought it out of the petrified forms of its existence in the previous century, and a hugely important figure in the realization of the full potential of historical materialism.
References
Barrett, Michèle. 1980. Women's Oppression Today, Verso.
Delphy, Christine. 1993. 'Rethinking Sex and Gender', Women's Studies International Forum, 16, 1, 1-9.
Delphy, Christine. 2016. 'Patriarchy, feminism and their intellectuals' (first published in Nouvelles Questions Féministes, No. 2, October 1981), in Christine Delphy, Close to Home, Verso, pp. 138-53.
Downing, Lisa. 2018. 'Antisocial Feminism? Shulamith Firestone, Monique Wittig and Proto-Queer Theory', Paragraph, 41, 3, 364-79.
Echols, Alice. 2007. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, University of Minnesota Press.
Faludi, Susan. 2013. 'Death of a Revolutionary', New Yorker, April 13
(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/death-of-a-revolutionary).
Firestone, Shulamith. 1998. Airless Spaces, Semiotext(e).
Martha E. Gimenez. 2018. Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays, Brill, 2018.
Haraway, Donna. 1978. 'Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic, Part I: A Political Physiology of Dominance', Signs, 4,1, 21-36.
Margree, Victoria. 2018. Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone, Zero Books.
Margree, Victoria. 2019. 'Shulamith Firestone - Xenofeminist Before Her Time?', The Mantle, 24 January, available at http://www.themantle.com/philosophy/shulamith-firestone-xenofeminist-her-time, accessed 28 August 2019.
Merck, Mandy and Stella Sandford, eds. 2010. Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone, Palgrave Macmillan.
Oakley, Ann. [1972] 1985. Sex, Gender and Society, Gower/Maurice Temple Smith.
O'Brien, Mary. 1981. The Politics of Reproduction, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Sandford, Stella. 2007. 'Sexmat, Revisited', Radical Philosophy, 145, 28-35.
Sandford, Stella. 2010. 'The Dialectic of The Dialectics of Sex', in Merck and Sandford, eds, above, pp. 235-53.
Warner, Michael. 1993. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, University of Minnesota Press.
Weeks, Kathi. 2015. 'The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s', South Atlantic Quarterly, 114, 4, 735-54.
Wittig, Monique. 1976. ‘The Category of Sex’, in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1992.
Wittig, Monique. [1980] 1992. 'One is Not Born a Woman', in Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Beacon Press.
So to its chequered history. Stella Sandford, who came across a copy for a pound in a bargain bin in North London in 2006, comments that: 'Like many other students of the history of feminism (my formal feminist education began in the late 1980s) all I knew of Firestone was that she argued for the abolition of biological reproduction, as the necessary condition for freeing women from the natural basis of their oppression. This was why, I presumed, she was consigned to the bargain bin. I had never read The Dialectic of Sex, of course' (Sandford, 2010: 235). Her sense of the book at that point is understandable. For Donna Haraway, despite her immense importance to feminists, Firestone 'made the basic mistake of reducing social relations to natural objects ... [t]hat is, she accepted that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations' (Haraway, 1978, 24-5). For Michèle Barrett, she saw the 'biological family' as a natural entity of which the nuclear family was the most recent manifestation, and invoked 'an apparently universal and trans-historical category of male dominance, leaving us with little hope of change' (Barrett, 1980, 12 and 195-7). For Christine Delphy, she was 'outrageously biologistic' (Delphy, [1981] 2016: 143), and for Mary O'Brien (1981:79) she was guilty of 'genderic determinism'. Sandford's first critical response once she read the book was ambivalent. She found aspects of it 'surprisingly perhaps, instructive as a way into the contemporary debate about "sex"' (Sandford, 2007: 28), but described her category of the biological family as 'at best an ill-chosen metaphor, at worst a vicious contradiction in terms' (ibid: 30), and concluded that she 'foregrounds sex in an analysis that seems not to recognize a distinction between sex and gender' (ibid: 30-31). Three years later, though, while she still regarded her as wrong on some fundamental issues, she offered a more nuanced reading, reflected in a distinct shift in tone. 'Why', she began by asking, 'did the history of feminism effectively erase the fact that one of the main aims of Firestone’s radical feminism was to “attack sex distinctions themselves”?', and she identified 'a failure to appreciate her implicit attempt to specify a conception of sex such that it could be posited as the basis for women's oppression without being the basis for the justification of its continuation' (Sandford, 2010: 235, paraphrasing rather than citing Firestone, p. 16; see also pp. 239-40). In 2015 Kathi Weeks pushed a little further, proposing to read The Dialectic of Sex as a 'utopian manifesto', and suggesting a number of ways of interpreting its insistence that the oppression of women is grounded in nature, in that 'the gender division of both productive and reproductive labor is fundamental to the sex class system, and ... the division of labor is founded on biological reproduction' (Weeks, 2015: 738). She first considered but questioned the idea that she simply confuses the social for the biological, then entertained the thought that 'one could just as easily read Firestone’s claim as a smart political tactic: instead of swimming against the tide, she first accepts the argument that inequality is natural and then pulls the rug out from under it by characterizing it as a historical argument irrelevant to the future. Then she went on,
'While I am sympathetic to both of those readings of Firestone’s argument about the natural foundation of women’s oppression, there is a third interpretation to consider as well. This one reads the assertion in the context of the utopian manifesto, a genre with its own reading protocols. For example, we can reinterpret the claim about the biological basis of gender oppression in relation to the two key functions of the generic form. The first of these is critical, to use the possibility of a better future to shed light on and raise questions about the present. From this perspective, the implication of Firestone’s argument, namely, that it may be more realistic and politically feasible to eliminate the biological division of reproductive labor than the social one, is thought provoking, to say the least. The argument invites us to consider whether the plasticity of gender makes it in some ways a more elusive target than the rather simple and innocent notion of “nature” that undergirds the antifeminist analysis. Rather than a capitulation to biological essentialism, the argument could be seen as the ultimate, because so literal, example of feminist denaturalization' (Weeks, 2015: 739; emphasis mine).
Then in 2018 we find Lisa Downing reading Firestone in parallel with her 'shadow sister' Monique Wittig, rather than in contrast to her, as a 'proto-queer theorist': the discourse and logic employed by Firestone are 'queer along the lines of Michael Warner's post-Foucauldian definition of queer as that which provides "resistance to regimes of the normal"' (Downing, 2018: 368, citing Warner, 1993: xxvii). I haven't managed to read the recent monograph by Victoria Margree (2018), but it looks also to be strongly revisionist, and a contribution of hers that I have seen identifies Firestone as a 'xenofeminist before her time' (Margree, 2019). All in all, the significance of the text is wide open for debate.
Against this background, my focus is fairly narrow. As always, my first objective is to encourage you to read, or re-read, what is a solid gold classic text. Second, I argue that it has been misread: it is not biologically fundamentalist, technologically determinist, or heteronormative. In fact, it doesn't even require the adoption of artificial means of human reproduction. Beyond that, I offer you a new reading that is deliberately one-sided. Firestone followed Simone de Beauvoir in structuring her approach around a critical appropriation of both Marx and Freud, and took the position that 'beneath economics reality is psycho-social' (5). First, her recourse to Freud adds nothing; and it misfires badly in relation to race, in a chapter that nobody finds satisfactory. So as her materialist account of the origins, maintenance and reinforcement of the 'sex class' system stands up perfectly well if all reference to Freud is set aside, I disregard Freud, and attend only to the historical materialist analysis derived critically from Marx and Engels. Second, the priority she accords to the psychosocial leads to a lacuna in her approach to capitalism. She insists throughout that capitalism must be overthrown: 'We shall need a sexual revolution much larger than - inclusive of - a socialist one to truly eradicate all class systems' (12). Yet at the same time she replaces Engels' claim that 'the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period' with one that formally denies that capitalism has any other source or dynamic than that stemming from the psycho-social, and the 'sex class' system: 'The sexual-reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period' (13). She has no need to argue that the origins of capitalism lie in the sexual-reproductive organization of society, and she makes no serious attempt to do so. But by failing to integrate the specific dynamics of capitalist exploitation into her account of historical change, she leaves entirely obscure the relationship between the sex class and socialist revolutions. So Martha Gimenez is correct to argue that Firestone offers a 'theoretical analysis of sexism in isolation from modes of production' that is 'tantamount to separating men and women from their historical conditions of existence', although mistaken, in my view, as others are, in seeing Firestone's overall analysis of the oppression of women as resting 'upon biological and technological determinism and, as such .. inherently conservative in its theoretical assumptions and political implications' (Gimenez, 2018: 68, 174). The position I will defend is that while Firestone clearly saw herself as adopting the analytical method of Marx and Engels, and both building upon and deviating from the substantive analysis they produced, there is an apparently minor but very significant lapse in her application of that method which if corrected leads to a quite different picture: she emerges as a pioneering innovator who clears the path towards a development of Marxist theory, and an integration of Marxist and gender perspectives on equal, and equally historical materialist terms.
So, to begin at the beginning, Firestone prefaces the text with an epigraph that is anything but fundamentalist or essentialist - Engels' evocation of the 'primitive, naive, but intrinsically correct conception of the world' formulated by Heraclitus, that 'everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, coming into being and passing away'. This denies any fixed content to nature along with everything else, and seems an odd way to situate an argument whose final appeal will be to biological fundamentalism. Then the opening lines of the book immediately problematize the idea of sex as a 'fundamental biological condition', or as beyond change. First, she states that 'Sex class is so deep as to be invisible' (emphasis mine). 'Sex class', not 'sex' - we are immediately in the realm of the social. Second, she invokes the contrasting perspective of a reformist or liberal approach to women's liberation, which misses this in judging by surface appearances: '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 workforce'. But it can't. Third, then, she imagines the reaction to the suggestion that 'sex class' itself could be changed: '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. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that'. Fourth, it is in response to this that the idea of a fundamental biological condition appears: 'This gut reaction - the assumption that, even when they don't know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition - is an honest one'. The idea of a fundamental biological condition that cannot be changed is not the standpoint that Firestone herself adopts. It is introduced as pertaining to a view honestly held by the 'common man, woman and child', that leads them to believe in turn that deep-seated 'sex class' cannot be changed. And fifth, she acknowledges that we barely have the language to address the depth and scope of the change she imagines: 'That so profound a change cannot be easily fit into traditional categories of thought, e.g., "political", is not because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it' (1).
So runs the very first paragraph of the book, in full. The sentence that follows acknowledges the apparent common sense behind the prevailing gut reaction, but suggests at the same time that it is mistaken, as what once appeared as a fundamental and unalterable biological condition can now be questioned: 'Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity'. Yet the social, institutional and cultural obstacles are formidable: 'The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer. ... Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the organization of nature. ... For we are dealing with ... an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself' (2).
Feminists, then, must question 'the organization of nature', and first Marx and Engels, then Simone de Beauvoir, point the way. So, turning to the manner in which she will address this issue, Firestone invokes the dialectical and materialist analytic method of Marx and Engels (a method already reflected in her opening comments on the contrast between surface appearances and depth). Where previous socialist thinkers had been able to do no more than moralize about existing social inequalities, so that 'their ideas existed in a cultural vacuum, utopian',
'Marx and Engels ... attempted a scientific approach to history. They traced the class conflict to its real economic origins, projecting an economic solution based on objective economic conditions already present: the seizure by the proletariat of the means of production would lead to a communism in which government had withered away, no longer needed to repress the lower class for the sake of the higher. In the classless society the interests of every individual would be synonymous with those of the larger society' (3).
However, the doctrine of historical materialism 'much as it was a brilliant advance over previous historical analysis, was not the complete answer, as later events bore out' (3). It was partial (her emphasis, p. 4), because it stopped at class struggle. Engels did better than Marx (observing inter alia that 'the original division of labour was between man and woman for the purposes of child-breeding') but while Engels 'at times dimly perceives' a whole sexual substratum of the historical dialectic, 'because he can see sexuality only through an economic filter, reducing everything to that, he is unable to evaluate it in its own right' (4). So as Firestone sets out to develop 'a materialist view of history based on sex itself' (5) she turns to the only early feminist to avoid 'skimming the surface', Simone de Beauvoir. She is 'the only one who came close to - who perhaps has done - the definitive analysis'; but at the same time she is 'almost too sophisticated', in giving priority to 'the sign of duality which is not in the first place sexual in character', when she might have 'seriously considered the much simpler and more likely possibility that this fundamental dualism sprang from the sexual division itself' (7). Three steps in the argument follow, and they must be taken together. First, via a critique of De Beauvoir, Firestone identifies procreation as the focus of her analysis:
'Before assuming such categories [as 'Otherness', 'Transendence', and 'Immanence'], let us first try to develop an analysis in which biology itself - procreation - is at the origin of the dualism. The immediate assumption of the layman that the unequal division of the sexes is "natural" may be well-founded. We need not immediately look beyond this. Unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equally privileged. Although, as Beauvoir points out, this difference of itself did not necessitate the development of a class system - the domination of one group by another - the reproductive functions of these differences did' (8).
Second, and immediately following, she introduces the 'biological family' ('the basic reproductive unit of male/female/infant, in whatever form of social organization) as 'an inherently unequal power distribution', characterized by [four] fundamental - if not immutable - facts': that women throughout history before the advent of birth control were 'at the continual mercy of their biology', and 'dependent on males ... for physical survival'; that 'human infants take an even longer time to grow up than animals, and thus are helpless and for a short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival'; 'that a basic mother/child interdependency has existed in some form in every society, past or present, and thus has shaped the psychology of every mature female and every infant'; and that 'the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labour at the origins of class, as well as furnishing the paradigm of caste (discrimination based on biological characteristics)' (8-9).
But third, having apparently painted herself into a deterministic corner, she stipulates
'But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the Kingdom of Nature does not reign absolute. As Simone de Beauvoir herself admits [citing the opening lines of Chapter 3 of The Second Sex, on 'The Point of View of Historical Materialism']:
'The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some most important truths. Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis – in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action'.
Firestone develops her argument step by step. I suggest that the whole passage has to be read in the light of the third step above, which insists with De Beauvoir that humanity is not an animal species, but a historical reality. I interpret it as follows: there is an irreducible natural or biological aspect to procreation, or there has been at least for much of human history. But even so, human procreation is not an exclusively natural act, by virtue of the fact that humanity is not an animal species. It is at the same time a social act, to which De Beauvoir's point that human society does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over control of nature on its own behalf through practical action applies. The biological family, in turn, is not natural at all, in Firestone's framework, but an entirely human social institution (and this also recalls Marx and Engels, in the German Ideology, on the family as 'to begin with ... the only social relation' - Collected Works, Vol. 5, p 43), and one that is maintained and reinforced by cultural institutions (13). Recalcitrant as available language may be, Firestone strives for precision. So with 'fundamental - if not immutable': the fact that human infants are 'for a short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival' is immutable, and she wants this period of helpless dependence to be as short as possible. The others are not, and she proposes alternative social arrangements that problematize the concept of the biological family and amount to its abolition as a social form. So while 'the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labour at the origins of class', and the resulting unequal distribution of power initially enabled men to make the biological family unit the cornerstone of the sex class system, subsequent technological advances - in control of fertility and potentially in artificial reproduction - mean that women have it in their hands to challenge and overthrow the 'sex class' system.
In short, De Beauvoir's insistence that human society does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf, and that this 'arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action' captures Firestone's politics precisely. Immediately following its introduction, she goes on to say:
'Thus, the "natural" is not necessarily a "human" value. Humanity has begin to outgrow nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in Nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it. ... The problem becomes political, demanding more than a comprehensive historical analysis, when one realizes that, though man is increasingly capable of freeing himself from the biological conditions that created his tyranny over women and children, he has little reason to want to give this up. [And now following Engels] Though the sex class system may have originated in fundamental biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological basis of their oppression has been swept away that women and children will be freed. On the contrary, the new technology, especially fertility control, may be used against them to reinforce the entrenched system of exploitation. So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility - the new population biology as well as all the institutions of childbearing and childrearing' (10-11).
To state the obvious, Firestone models her account of 'sex class' on the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that Marx and Engels saw as central. She is no more a technological determinist than she is a biological determinist. The line of argument, rather, is that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of (sex) class struggles':
'And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so 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' (11).
So where Marx foretold the end of capitalist private property:
'As soon as this metamorphosis has sufficiently decomposed the old society throughout its depth and breadth, as soon as the workers have been turned into proletarians, and their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialization of labour and the further transformation of the soil and other means of production into socially exploited and therefore communal means of production takes on a new form ... The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they are incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated' (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin, 1976, pp. 928-9),
Firestone proclaims the end of the biological family:
'The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of the other 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 division of labour would be ended by by the elimination of labour altogether (cybernation). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken'.
And she concludes the chapter as noted above by adapting Engels' definition of historical materialism from Socialism: Utopian or Scientific to make 'the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another' the 'ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events', even venturing that the 'sexual-reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period' (12, 13).
In short, sex class is made possible by or grounded on the unequal division of labour in procreation, but it is instituted by the exercise of 'class' power and sustained by social institutions and ideologies - by the nuclear family as the current form of the biological family, and the ruling ideology of the dominant sex class erected upon it - a construction that pictures two genders, with complementary social roles (male breadwinner, female child-rearer and housewife), and characteristics that are proclaimed to be 'natural'. Firestone's explicit point, shared with Simone de Beauvoir, is that none of this is entailed by the process of procreation itself. It is worth noting in this respect that the word 'nature' appears in three forms in the text, as in the sentence 'Thus, the "natural" is not necessarily a "human" value. Humanity has begin to outgrow nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in Nature': my sense is that Firestone is fairly consistent in writing it without punctuation when she uses it neutrally, in scare quotes ("nature") when she uses it to mean both natural and social, and with a capital N (Nature) when it is deployed within the dominant ideology as a determining force.
Firestone does hold, then, that the sexual imbalance of power reflected in 'sex class' is biologically based, in the specific sense of being originally rooted in the division of labour in the material process of procreation. Delphy, it is worth recalling, would similarly recognize 'procreational functional differences between individuals' (1993: 5), before going on to challenge the link between those differences and the way in which a given society represents 'biology' to itself - especially when the error is committed of assuming that 'it is self-evident that there are two, and only two, sexes, and that this dichotomy exactly cross-checks with the division between potential bearers and non-bearers of children'.
Firestone is just as adamant that both the biological/nuclear family and gender itself are socially constructed. 'To make both women and children totally independent', she remarks later, 'would be to eliminate not just the patriarchal nuclear family, but the biological family itself' (48). And, again on the patriarchal nuclear family: 'even its short history, roughly from the fourteenth century on, is revealing: the growth of our most cherished family values was contingent on cultural conditions, its foundations in no sense absolute' (75). And on gender roles, she initially describes the 'radical feminist view' as aiming to overthrow 'the class system based on sex - a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles an undeserving legitimacy and seeming permanence' (14). The focus on roles - and specifically roles prescribed by the prevailing sex class system, the manner in which they are enforced, and the means by which they can be challenged - continues throughout. It starts with a bleak assessment of situation in 1970, after the 'fifty-year ridicule' of the earlier radical women's movements: 'By 1970 the rebellious daughters of this wasted generation no longer, for practical purposes, even knew there had been a feminist movement', and in the meantime, 'The cultural indoctrinations necessary to reinforce sex role traditions had become blatant, tasteless, where before they had been insidious' (30, emphasis mine). 'Femininity' and 'masculinity' are just as socially constructed. So when she remarks that a young girl 'rejects everything identified with her mother, i.e. servility and wiles, the psychology of the oppressed, and imitates everything she has seen her brother do that gains for him the kind of freedom and approval she is seeking', she immediately adds in parentheses '(Notice I do not say she pretends masculinity. These traits are not sexually determined)' (53). Later, she remarks that 'Freudianism was gradually revised to suit the pragmatic needs of clinical therapy: it became an applied science complete with white-coated technicians, its contents subverted for a reactionary end - the socialization of men and women in an artificial sex-role system' (70). The chapter 'Down With Childhood!' builds on the assertion that 'The heart of women's oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles. And in turn children are defined in relation to this role and are psychologically formed by it; what they become as adults and the sorts of relationships they are able to form determine the society they will ultimately build' (72). Firestone's account of the gradual separation of childhood from adulthood and boys from girls by social, institutional and cultural innovations notes specifically how these differentiations eventually become "natural": 'In each case a physical difference [was] enlarged culturally with the help of special dress, education, manners, and activity until this cultural reinforcement itself began to appear "natural", even instinctive, an exaggeration process that enables easy stereotyping: the individual eventually appears to be a different kind of human animal with its own peculiar set of laws and behaviour' (89). This is the context in which Firestone introduces her own experience, and demonstrates both her acute awareness that gender is politically constructed, and her political response. What is at stake when a child or woman does not play her expected role and 'smile as she should', thereby indicating acquiescence to her own oppression? She tells us:
'In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My "dream" action for the women's liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their "pleasing" smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them' (90).
Kathi Weeks describes this notion as 'amusing' (Weeks, 2015: 737), but it is clearly much more than that. It confirms that Firestone was every bit as aware as anyone that gender was socially constructed, remorselessly, every day, and that women were constantly at risk of reinforcing their own oppression.
Finally, there is no better case for regarding Firestone's stance as heteronormative. She expresses the view almost casually, in passing, that Freud's account of the 'Electra Complex' 'incidentally, disproves a biological heterosexuality' (52). The discussion that follows suffers from her attempt to advance her argument in the context of Freud and the incest taboo, and there is plenty in passing that appears to denigrate homosexuality and lesbianism (these being the terms she uses). But it transpires as she completes the argument that she regards heterosexuality as just as limited and 'obstructed' a form of sexuality, and looks forwards to it withering away:
'Thus we see that in a family-based society, repressions due to the incest taboo make a totally fulfilled sexuality impossible for anyone, and a well-functioning sexuality possible for only a few. Homosexuals in our time are only the extreme casualties of the system of obstructed sexuality that develops in the family. But though homosexuality at present is as limited and sick as our heterosexuality, a day may soon come in which a healthy transsexuality would be the norm. For if we grant that the sexual drive is at birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the total personality (Freud's "polymorphous perversity") and, as we have seen, becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo; and that, furthermore, the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family; then if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with the repressions that mould sexuality into specific formations. 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' (59).
I'm not suggesting here, at all, that the argument is well made. But it is beyond dispute that Firestone regards heteronormativity as an ideological construction associated with the sex class system and the patriarchal nuclear family, and rejects it.
Similar example abound in subsequent chapters, but this review is long enough already, and I have further to go. After a very brief reference to the conclusion, therefore, I return finally to Firestone's relationship to classical Marxism. The point to be highlighted is that Firestone's analysis continues to be political, rather than biologically or technologically determinist, as best reflected in her response to the possible consequences if the patriarchal nuclear family is replaced by a new system of households with shared responsibility for a number of children. Speculating that it might turn out that there is no 'instinct' for pregnancy, and that in changed social circumstances women might no longer want to "have" children at all, she is characteristically brisk: 'Might this not be a disaster, given that artificial reproduction is not yet perfected? But women have no special reproductive obligation to the species. If they are no longer willing, then artificial methods will have to be developed hurriedly, or, at the very least, satisfactory compensations - other than destructive ego investments - would have to be supplied to make it worth their while' (233; cf. 238). Note in passing that this rules out 'having a baby of your own', pointing instead in the direction of social surrogacy. Principally, though, Firestone's insistence that women have no special reproductive obligation to the species captures the politics of The Dialectic of Sex far more than does a reference out of context to artificial reproduction. Along the same lines, her closing reference to the possibility that in the future pregnancy 'would be indulged in, if at all, only as a tongue-in-cheek archaism' (241) is a specific reflection of a time when such a choice would no longer have any further implications for gender roles or relations, but simply be the free choice of an individual.
Firestone's principal target, it turns out, is the social structure of the biological or patriarchal nuclear family, and the sex class system built around it. The difference between Firestone and those who argue for the socially constructed character of gender, sex, woman is not that she disagrees with those arguments. It is that she rejects as wishful thinking the notion that the oppression of women of which these social constructions are a constitutive part can be challenged by discursive fiat, rather than by overthrowing the social structures at their root. So although Firestone was not mentioned at any point in the article in question, Delphy's comment applies: ''All feminists reject the sex/gender hierarchy, but very few are ready to admit that the logical consequence of this rejection is a refusal of sex roles, and the disappearance of gender. ... Very few indeed are happy to contemplate there being simple anatomical sexual differences which are not given any social significance or symbolic value' (Delphy, 1993: 6). This was Firestone's whole agenda.
Finally, then, although critical commentaries on Firestone, including those referenced above, have generally skated very lightly over her adoption of a Marxist method of analysis, it runs deep. As noted above, she accepts entirely Marx's critique of capitalism, and the need for a socialist revolution, though without fully integrating it into her analysis. But she equally charges Marx and Engels with failing to get to the heart of sex class oppression, and, like many others, argues that the classical Marxist framework needs to be supplemented or even fundamentally reworked as a consequence. In conclusion, I will suggest that this is not necessarily so, and that Firestone herself had already identified the reason why.
As noted above, she stated right at the start that 'Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity'. And she adds later that 'Marx could not take fully into account the future advent of cybernetics' (60). Precisely so. Neither Marx nor Engels lived to see the twentieth-century advances that allowed women enhanced control over their own fertility, let alone the prospect of artificial reproduction, though they did anticipate a world changed by revolutionary forms of machine. But they argued from the start that what men and women are ‘coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce’; that this focus on production included ‘the production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation’; and that the family within which they propagated their kind was to be understood ‘in relation to the history of industry and exchange’ (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, Vol. 5, 2010: 31-2, 43). And their analytical method was underpinned by the assumption that in bourgeois society, where capital is dominant, it assigns rank and influence to other modes of production, which at the same time appear to it as barriers to overcome: it seeks ‘to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive from its standpoint’ (Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973: 106-107, 408). And in Capital, finally, Marx identified the tendency, in industrial capitalism, for the 'modern science of technology' to dissolve the 'varied, apparently unconnected and petrified forms of the social production process' into 'conscious and planned applications of natural science' (Marx, Capital, Penguin, 1976: 616-7). So Firestone's historical materialist account of the 'dialectic of sex' may do more to confirm the power of the analytical framework produced by Marx and Engels than she was able to see. But by the same token, it also makes her a pioneer in the analysis of its implications for the production of fresh life in procreation once advances in science brought it out of the petrified forms of its existence in the previous century, and a hugely important figure in the realization of the full potential of historical materialism.
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