In Memory of Shulamith Firestone

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Over the years I occasionally googled (shame on my laziness, depending solely on google) Shulamith Firestone, wondering what became of this second wave feminist who wrote the Dialectic of Sex, a brilliant, ground breaking, and sometimes wrongheaded (in my humble opinion) book that profoundly affected me, only a few years younger than she. I found nothing beyond the mention of the book: no other publications, no political activities, no personal statistics about where she lived, who she lived with, how she spent her time.

Yesterday, in the New Yorker, I found out. Firestone died last August, alone, suffering from mental illness, in the 10^th Street apartment she’d lived in since the 1970s.  I cried as I read Susan Faludi’s account of Firestone’s life: stifled and expelled by an Orthodox Jewish father; abandoned by a mother who failed to defend her; and betrayed by a sisterhood that descended into chaos and power struggles unable, as Faludi describes it, “to thrive in the world they had done so much to create.”

I’ve often written of the internecine fighting that ruins movements and demoralizes its movents, but the radical feminism of the 1960s and 70s was so powerful and so necessary that despite its failures and destroyed lives so many of us would not be who we are today without it. That’s what makes Firestone’s story, and others like her, all the more tragic. Faludi quotes from feminist Kate Millet’s essay, “The Feminist Time Forgot,” about those who had “disappeared to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion or vanished into asylums and have yet to return to tell the tale.” Firestone was one of those who “vanished into asylums,” many times, diagnosed as schizophrenic. Several times support groups were organized by one of her sisters and women friends, but in the end she died alone and poverty stricken in her tenement.

As I said in my Marriage blog, I recently reread the Dialectic of Sex. The idea of cyber babies she posits as the means to free women “from the tyranny of their reproductive biology” makes me laugh. Other readers will object to any number of other views that “take on the world,” as Millett thought her book did. That’s what a revolutionary book does, and Shulamith Firestone was indeed a revolutionary. I suppose I’m glad that I finally found out what happened to her, but I’m also profoundly sad. Rest in peace, “Shulie.”

Only in France

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In the New York Times Style section there was an article about the French debating gay marriage in “Their Fashion.” The kind of conversation they are having hasn’t taken place in this country since the 1970s. Only the French would still be objecting to gay marriage “because they [gays] want a bourgeois life.” That sententious statement was made by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who dresses the bourgeoisie (and whose punk couture is featured in a new show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York). His comrade Frédéric Montel explained that marriage is “a conservative movement, about stability in society . . . and becoming rather ordinary.”

The article also quoted a feminist historian who thinks the movement for same-sex marriage is “a project for gay men, not lesbians.” Back in the 1960s Julia Kristeva, also French, described the institution of marriage as “identification by women with the very power structures previously considered as frustrating, oppressive or inaccessible.” (Women’s Time)

When conservatives in this country get behind gay marriage as a family value it’s time to get back to the conversation (not about the bourgeoisie, heaven forbid, a term absolutely censored in American discourse) about why we’re doing all this work to prop up an institution because we can’t be part of it. It’s like the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell solution to gays wanting to serve in the military: why in the world should we be fighting for the right for anyone to serve in the military? Why in the world are we fighting for the institution of marriage when half of them (the heterosexual ones; since the other kind exist only in a few states, we can’t get statistics) end in divorce? Why are we letting this issue distract us from far more important issues not only in the lives of women but to all of us?

Last week the call in show on KUNM was about gay marriage, specifically the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Bernalillo County Clerk for refusing to issue marriage licenses to two lesbian couples. The lawsuit claims that the New Mexico marriage statutes and the New Mexico Constitution do not bar same-sex couples from marrying, and therefore the state should issue civil marriage licenses to any same-sex couple that applies for one.

The KUNM producers, in their knee jerk attempt at “objectivity” had fundamentalist preacher Glen Strock on the telephone as their token reactionary. He spewed his venom about homosexuals as an “abomination” and how they need the rest of society’s help because of their “mental illness, promiscuity, and drug addiction.” While no one brought up the divorce rate and the havoc that brings to Strock’s society, several people at least tiptoed into a conversation about the institution by making the distinction between civil unions and marriage: the first, sanctioned by the state to everyone who applies for a license; the second in a church or private ceremony to reflect the individuals’ beliefs or need for some sort of public recognition or rite of passage. It doesn’t do much to enhance the conversation about monogamy, the nuclear family, the impossible expectations, all the questions the institution raises, but at least it would protect the legal rights of those who wish to form a union.

But as Yasmin Nair questions in her blog (thanks, Terri, for turning me on to this), what legal rights are we talking about? The right to heath care benefits? As Nair points out, there should be universal health care for everyone, regardless of marital status. The gay-marriage-as-legal-right argument buys into a neoliberal agenda that requires state sanction of what should be our inalienable rights. Again, Nair: “Let us, queers who understand the problems with gay marriage as an economically and socially conservative issue and our straight allies, begin to dispense with the silly idea that there has ever been anything about gay marriage that could even vaguely be described as left/liberal/progressive.  Rather, progressives, liberals, and self-described lefties would do well to echo Republican Jon Hunstman, and speak the truth plainly, that gay marriage is a conservative cause.

And so it comes full circle: Karl Lagerfeld, maven of the fashion industry, who disdains gay marriage because it’s a conservative movement, and Jon Huntsman, a Republican presidential hopeful, who embraces gay marriage because it’s conservative. Only in France, but maybe only in America, too.