Name: Dialectic of Sex
Rating: 3.7 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9781784780524

Shulamith Firestone

A landmark manifesto - Susan Faludi, The New Yorker

Dialectic of Sex

"No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory second-wave landmark." --Naomi Wolf Originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, and going on to become a bestseller, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women's liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics. Beginning with a look at the radical and grassroots history of the first wave (with its foundation in the abolition movement of the time), Firestone documents its major victory, the granting of the vote to women in 1920, and the fifty years of ridicule that followed. She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproduction--for as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal. In the wake of recent headlines bemoaning women's squandered fertility and the ongoing debate over the appropriate role of genetics in the future of humanity, The Dialectic of Sex is revealed as remarkably relevant to today's society--a testament to Shulamith Firestone's startlingly prescient vision. Firestone died in 2012, but her ideas live on through this extraordinary book.

The Case for Feminist Revolution

The Dialectic of Sex

Jim Hagan

Firestone is an apt name because this is one of those books to me that brings something exogenous into the system - it has that much startling creative power. The fact that she produced this at 25 is very impressive.

However, it begins to lose power towards the middle and diminishes in insight and energy from there to the end. I thought the chapter on race was probably pretty clumsy but I'm far from an expert on that topic. She also probably should have known better at 25 than to suggest that adult-child sexual relations might ever be acceptable - although maybe I am doing her a disservice and read too much into the one sentence in the book which seemed to suggest this. And it's a shame because I think her work in the "down with childhood" chapter about children's agency and capability is interesting, and it's kind of overshadowed by that implication.

Still very much worth a read. Starting from the point of applying the Marxist dialectic to the sex distinction and approaching a work from the perspective of sex as the most essential binary construction is a great idea. And executed with genius.

Amelia Lang 

A super unique approach on women’s liberation but very convincing regardless. Firestone is a fantastic writer and inflammatory thinker that brings forth a lot of important feminist considerations. My only qualm is that it tends to boarder on gender essentialist at times, and the modern reader should recontextualize it to suit the necessary intersectionality of feminism.

Dialectic of Sex

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