Shulamith Firestone

Quotes

1. Freud captured the imagination of a whole continent and civilization for a good reason. Though on the surface inconsistent, illogical or "way out," his followers, with their cautious logic, their experiments and revisions have nothing comparable to say. Freudianism is so charted so impossible to repudiate because Freud grasped the crucial problem of modern life: Sexuality.

   p. 43

2. 

   The goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution. Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.

   p. 31

3. 

   Radical feminist movement has many political assets that no other movement can claim, a revolutionary potential far higher, as well as qualitatively different, from any in the past.

   p. 38

4. 

   In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious for . It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. Its aim: overthrow of the oldest, most rigid class/caste system in existence, the class system based on sex – a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles an undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence. In this perspective, the pioneer Western was only the first onslaught, the fifty-year ridicule that followed it only a first counter-offensive – the dawn of a long struggle to break free from the oppressive power structures set up by nature and reinforced by man.

   p. 15

5. 

   By and large, feminist theory has been as inadequate as were the early feminist attempts to correct sexism. This was to be expected. The problem is so immense that, at first try, only the surface could be skimmed, the most blatant inequalities described. Simone de Beauvoir was the only one who came close to – who perhaps has done – the definitive analysis. Her profound work – which appeared as recently as the early fifties to a world convinced that feminism was dead – for the first time attempted to ground feminism in its historical base. Of all feminist theorists De Beauvoir is the most comprehensive and far-reaching, relating feminism to the best ideas in our culture.

   p. 7

6. 

   Women have been allowed to achieve individuality only though their appearance.

7. 

   Feminism, in truth, has a cyclical momentum all its own. In the historical interpretation we have espoused, feminism is the inevitable female response to the development of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles – both the fundamental biological condition itself, and the sexual class system built upon, and reinforcing, this biological condition.

   p. 31

8. 

   Because class oppression of women and children couched in the phraseology of "cute" it is much harder to fight than open oppression

9. 

   Constant erotic stimulation of male sexuality coupled with its forbidden release through most normal channels are designed to encourage men to look at women as only things whose resistance to entrance must be overcome.

10. 

    The contemporary radical feminist position is the direct descendant of the radical feminist line in the old movement, notably that championed by Stanton and Anthony, and later by the militant Congressional Union subsequently known as the Woman’s Party. It sees feminist issues not only as women’s first priority, but as central to any larger revolutionary analysis. It refuses to accept the existing leftist analysis not because it is too radical, but because it is not radical enough: it sees the current leftist analysis as outdated and superficial, because this analysis does not relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system, the model for all other exploitative systems, and thus the tapeworm that must be eliminated first by any true revolution.

    p. 37

11. 

    Women throughout history before the advent of birth control were at the continual mercy of their biology - menstruation, menopause, and "female ills," constant painful childbirth, wetnursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males (whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government, community-at-large) for physical survival.

    p. 8

12. 

    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.

    p. 9