Quotes from Shulamith Firestone

The patriarchal family was only the most recent in a string of 'primary' social organizations, all of which defined woman as a different species due to her unique childbearing capacity. The term family was first used by the Romans to denote a social unit the head of which ruled over wife, children, and slaves - under Roman law he was invested with the rights of life and death over them all; famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man.

A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort 'belongs' to her.

the end goal of feminist revolution must be...not just the elimination of male privilage but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

new theories and new movements do not develop in a vacuum, they arise to spearhead the necessary social solutions to new problems resulting from contradictions in the environment.

Believe me, if all wives whose husbands had affairs left them, we would only have divorced women in this country.

The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance.

The pervasion of image has so deeply altered our very relationships to ourselves that even men have become objects--if never erotic objects.

Whichever it is, he does not question it, not understanding that his own behavior has been or could be a determining influence.

It is only the failure of my plots I fear.

[U]nless oppressed groups stick together, and on alliances of self interest rather than do-goodism; nothing can be accomplished in the long run to dismantle the apparatus of oppression.

For the real issue under all the fights about other women is the man is unable to commit himself.

Why postulate a fundamental Hegelian concept of Otherness as the final explanation— and then carefully document the biological and historical circumstances that have pushed the class "women" into such a category— when one has never seriously considered the much simpler and more likely possibility that this fundamental dualism sprang from the sexual division itself?

It is dangerous to feel sorry for one's oppressor — women are especially prone to this failing — but I am tempted to do it in this case. Being unable to love is hell.

The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer. To so heighten one's sensitivity to sexism presents problems far worse than the black militant's new awareness of racism: Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature.

cinsel s?n?flaÅŸmay? ve bunun aile yap?s? içindeki derin köklerini düÅŸünürsek, bugün doÄŸan herhangi bir kiÅŸinin, egemenlik psikolojisinin ortadan kald?r?ld???n? görebilmesi hemen hemen olanaks?zd?r.

Demek ki kad?n?n baÅŸlang?çta ve sonraki ezilmesine yol açan ÅŸey doÄŸurgan bedensel yap?s?d?r.

Tap?lmak, özgür olmak demek deÄŸildir. Çünkü tap?nma eylemi baÅŸka birisinin kafas?nda olmakt?r; o kafa da Erkek kafas?d?r. Böylece tarih boyunca, kültürün her evresi ve her türünde, kad?nlar bedensel iÅŸlevleri yüzünden ezilmiÅŸlerdir.

Moreover, the oppressed have no job to convince all people. All they need to know is that the present system is destroying them.

we are talking about the abolition of the labor force itself under a cybernetic socialism, the radical restructuring of the economy to make "work," i.e., wage labor, no longer necessary. In our post-revolutionary society adults as well as children would be provided for — irrespective of their social contributions — in the first equal distribution of wealth in history.

If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it.

Thus 'falling in love' is no more than the process of alteration of male vision - through idealization, mystification, glorification - that renders void the woman's class inferiority.

These women, for all their superb drafsmanship and compositional skill, remained minor painters because they had "lifted" a set of traditions and a view of the world that was inauthentic for them. They worked within the limits of what had been defined as female by a male tradition: they saw women through male eyes, painted a male's idea of female.

Perhaps it is true that a representation of only the female side of things - which tends to be one long protest and complaint rather than the portrayal of a full and substantive existence - is limited. But an equally relevant question, one much less frequently asked, is: Is it more limited than the prevailing male view of things, which when not taken as absolute truth - is at least seen as "serious," relevant and important?

The failure of the Russian Revolution is directly traceable to the failure of its attempts to eliminate the family and sexual repression […] By the same token, all socialist revolutions to date have been or will be failures for precisely these reasons. Any initial liberation under current socialism must always revert back to repression, because the family structure is the source of psychological, economic, and political oppression.