Quotes from Shulamith Firestone

Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie.

Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.

Feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.

Thus her whole identity hangs in the balance of her love life. She is allowed to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love.

love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon--it becomes complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power.

If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are.

Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.

He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies.

a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo. And if it is your wife that is revolting, you can't just split to the suburbs. Feminism, when it truly achieves it's goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.

A fair and generous woman is (at best) respected, but seldom loved.

Thus her whole identity hangs in the balance of her love life. She is allowed to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love.

To be worshiped is not freedom.

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.

he will go to his grave feeling cheated, never realizing that there isn't much difference between one woman and the other, that it is the loving that creates the difference.

It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce even a true 'female' art. For a woman who participates in (male) culture must achieve and be rated by standards of a tradition she had no part in making - and certainly there is no room in that tradition for a female view, even if she could discover what it was.

It is only after we have integrated the dark side of the moon into our world view that we can begin to talk seriously of universal culture.

Emancipated' women found out that the honesty, generosity, and camaraderie of men was a lie.

The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF!

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate--and I wish I could find one.

In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality. It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. Its aim: the 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 and undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence.

Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated.

childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun. (Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)

But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.