Post: #1

Article by Susan Faludi in The New Yorker on an early (late 60's-early 70's) feminist activist and writer. TL;DR version: radical feminist leader withdraws from movement over cruel backbiting and internal squabbles, diagnosed with paranoid schizphrenia, dies alone and on welfare.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/...act_faludi

The subject is Shulamith Firestone, who wrote The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (pub. 1970) and helping form various feminist organizations. She recently died alone in a tenement apartment where she'd been living on public assistance.

The easy sound bite from this is: "founding feminist literally insane!" But it is also interesting reading for a portrait of the self-destructive way feminist groups functioned (which Faludi blames for Firestone's descent into insanity).

In April, 1976, Ms. ran an essay that generated more letters than any article it had previously published. The author was Jo Freeman, and the subject was one that she had avoided committing to print for a long time: a “social disease” that had been attacking the women’s movement for some years. She called it “trashing.” She wrote:


Like a cancer, the attacks spread from those who had reputations to those who were merely strong; from those who were active to those who merely had ideas; from those who stood out as individuals to those who failed to conform rapidly enough to the twists and turns of the changing line.

In Washington, D.C., Marilyn Webb was forced out of Off Our Backs—because she was the only one with journalistic experience. “First it was ‘You can’t write at all; you have to help other people,’ ” she recalled. Then she was told that she couldn’t accept public-speaking engagements. “And then it was just ‘Get out!’ ” Freeman was ostracized by members of Westside, the group she had helped found. “There were dark hints about my ‘male’ ambitions—such as going to graduate school,” she said. Carol Giardina, who now teaches women’s studies and American history at Queens College, said, “I don’t know anyone who founded a group and did early organizing” who wasn’t thrown out. “It was just a disaster, a total disaster.” She was ousted from her Florida group by “moon goddess” worshippers who accused her of being “too male-identified.

John Duff, a sculptor who was Firestone’s on-again, off-again boyfriend in this period, remembers Firestone telling him that she had been forced out by an “anti-leadership” faction. “And guess who became the new leaders?” she said to him. “The anti-leaders.”

To be fair, the piece is also a reminder of how some kind of feminist movement was needed at the time, describing women who took the stage at an antiwar march to speak about women's issues being drowned out by men shouting, "Take her off the stage and fuck her!” and “Fuck her down a dark alley!”

Post: #2

It is sickly ironic to notice that many women she supposed liberated will die just like her - cold and alone. Supported by the government.

Post: #3

The first thing I did was wiki her to see if she was Jewish. Yep, from an Orthodox family. Leftist intellectuals are entirely too predictable. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy - I think it has more to do with a victim mentality as Nietzsche pointed out. These people tend to be either Jews or Northern European Protestants (British, German, Scandinavian)

Post: #4

Not good to take pleasure in another person's misery, man or woman, the New Yorker article had a good summary of why some female rights awareness was necessary, I don't use the word feminism because it implies something against men, but most men are much better off in the USA than in someplace like Saudi Arabia.

The tougher among us may do well in EE or South America, but the majority here hasn't moved yet, and feet speak louder than words.

I tried to live in Ukraine ( about 8 months ) and it was too bleak and simply dumb compared to someplace like California. The masses of bright, proactive people in the USA that create superior technology, art, and a fairly transparent bureaucracy (relatively speaking) just aren't there.

Here's the New Yorker's ideas on why women needed to bitch. Also,
thanks to OP, and this is not directed at you, but "TL;DR" (too long, didn't read) is not an intellectual argument, many soundbyte bloggers seem to think it is. .:

"In the late nineteen-sixties, Firestone and a small cadre of her “sisters” were at the radical edge of a movement that profoundly changed American society. At the time, women held almost no major elected positions, nearly every prestigious profession was a male preserve, homemaking was women’s highest calling, abortion was virtually illegal, and rape was a stigma to be borne in silence. Feminism had been in the doldrums ever since the first wave of the American women’s movement won the vote, in 1920, and lost the struggle for greater emancipation. Feminist energy was first co-opted by Jazz Age consumerism, then buried in decades of economic depression and war, until the dissatisfactions of postwar women, famously described by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), gave rise to a “second wave” of feminism."

That said, this woman clearly had signs of psych problems even amidst her early publishing accomplishments:

“Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization, the biological family—the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled—the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated,” Firestone wrote. She elaborated, with characteristic bluntness: “Pregnancy is barbaric”;

To equate family structure with exploitation is a priori absurd, there would be no one to commit exploitation, be exploited, or be "liberated" if there were no families.

The above quote has a strong paranoid flavor in that it equates processes essential to human existence to conspiracies.

Post: #5

(04-19-2013 04:43 PM)iknowexactly Wrote:  Not good to take pleasure in another person's misery, man or woman, the New Yorker article had a good summary of why some female rights awareness was necessary, I don't use the word feminism because it implies something against men, but most men are much better off in the USA than in someplace like Saudi Arabia.

The tougher among us may do well in EE or South America, but the majority here hasn't moved yet, and feet speak louder than words.

I tried to live in Ukraine ( about 8 months ) and it was too bleak and simply dumb compared to someplace like California. The masses of bright, proactive people in the USA that create superior technology, art, and a fairly transparent bureaucracy (relatively speaking) just aren't there.

Here's the New Yorker's ideas on why women needed to bitch. Also,
thanks to OP, and this is not directed at you, but "TL;DR" (too long, didn't read) is not an intellectual argument, many soundbyte bloggers seem to think it is. .:

"In the late nineteen-sixties, Firestone and a small cadre of her “sisters” were at the radical edge of a movement that profoundly changed American society. At the time, women held almost no major elected positions, nearly every prestigious profession was a male preserve, homemaking was women’s highest calling, abortion was virtually illegal, and rape was a stigma to be borne in silence. Feminism had been in the doldrums ever since the first wave of the American women’s movement won the vote, in 1920, and lost the struggle for greater emancipation. Feminist energy was first co-opted by Jazz Age consumerism, then buried in decades of economic depression and war, until the dissatisfactions of postwar women, famously described by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), gave rise to a “second wave” of feminism."

That said, this woman clearly had signs of psych problems even amidst her early publishing accomplishments:

“Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization, the biological family—the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled—the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated,” Firestone wrote. She elaborated, with characteristic bluntness: “Pregnancy is barbaric”;

To equate family structure with exploitation is a priori absurd, there would be no one to commit exploitation, be exploited, or be "liberated" if there were no families.

The above quote has a strong paranoid flavor in that it equates processes essential to human existence to conspiracies.

I'll say it again "Feminism enslaved women and liberated men". I'll be poolside, get to work bitches.