Thoughts on the Excerpt from The Dialectic of Sex, by Shulamith Firestone
I found this to be the most radical of all the readings so far, even more so than Charlotte Bunch's "Not for Lesbians Only". Firestone suggests, for example, "Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature" (p. 224). In short, under the kind of feminist revolution that is necessary, no assumptions whatsoever, about any aspect of women's (and men's) lives, may simply remain unchallenged and un-interrogated. Firestone suggests that, in order to fully understand all this, we need something "as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism" (Firestone).Therefore, sex and class do overlap, in a Marx-Engels/Feminist way, since women, like the poor class who create the conditions of possibility for eventual social
and economic revolution, are a similarly oppressed underclass. Therefore, as Firestone suggests, we must begin (and it is only a beginning) with something like the Marxist model, applied to feminism, if we hope for feminism to function as it must: eventually making a truly positive difference in women's lives, as revolution eventually would make in the lives of oppressed workers. This was a great reading! It made me think of feminism in a whole new way, even though The Dialectic of Sex is an older book. Much of what she discusses, like Marxism, is a bit out-of-date, from a day-to-day if not necessarily theoretical perspective, but Firestone still manages to make all of her ideas seem fresh. Maybe this book is a truly timeless classic about the human condition. This seems quite radical in and of itself, but as Fire
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 564
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)
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