Shulamith Firestone Quotes & Sayings

[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. — Shulamith Firestone

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

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

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. — Shulamith Firestone

To be worshiped is not freedom. — Shulamith Firestone

It is only the failure of my plots I fear. — Shulamith Firestone

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. — 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. — Shulamith Firestone

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

Women were the slave class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world ... — Shulamith Firestone

Men are thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are occupied with love. — Shulamith Firestone

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

Love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon
it becomes complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power. — Shulamith Firestone

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.) — Shulamith Firestone

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

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. — Shulamith Firestone

The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization. — Shulamith Firestone

No matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. — Shulamith Firestone

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

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. — Shulamith Firestone

The classic trap for any revolutionary is always, "What's your alternative?" But even if you could provide the interrogator with a blueprint, this does not mean he would use it: in most cases he is not sincere in wanting to know. In fact this is a common offensive, a technique to reflect revolutionary anger and turn it against itself. Moreover, the oppressed have no job to convince all people. All they need know is that the present system is destroying them. — Shulamith Firestone

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

The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF! — Shulamith Firestone

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

Romanticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions. — Shulamith Firestone

The personal is political. — Shulamith Firestone

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. — Shulamith Firestone

We should keep in mind that Revolutions anywhere are always glad to use any help they can get, even from women. But unless women also use the Revolution to further their own interests as well as everyone else's, unless they make it consistently clear that all help given now is expected to be returned, both now and after the Revolution, they will be sold out again and again ... — Shulamith Firestone

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

Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know. — Shulamith Firestone

The myth of childhood happiness flourishes so wildly not because it satisfies the needs of children but because it satisfies the needs of adults. In a culture of alienated people, the belief that everyone has at least one good period in life free of care and drudgery dies hard. And obviously you can't expect it in your old age. So it must be you've already had it. — Shulamith Firestone

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. — Shulamith Firestone

The 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value. Humanity has begun to transcend nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it. — Shulamith Firestone

All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate
and I wish I could find one. — Shulamith Firestone

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. — Shulamith Firestone

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

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

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

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. — Shulamith Firestone

The bar is the male kingdom. For centuries it was the bastion of male privilege, the gathering place for men away from their women, a place where men could go to freely indulge in The Bull Session. — Shulamith Firestone

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

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. — Shulamith Firestone

The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer. — Shulamith Firestone

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

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