Susan Faludi, one of my favorite contemporary American journalists, recently wrote a widely circulated piece in The New Yorker on the life and death of feminist Shulamith Firestone, author of the groundbreaking 1970 manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex. Faludi’s article briefly examines some of Firestone’s key ideas—ideas that helped shape the women’s liberation movement. The Dialectic of Sex, an innovative, 200-page reinterpretation of Marx and Freud, contended that the male-female antagonism was the most enduring form of oppression, and that, as such, it had to be confronted on its own terms, not as a mere addendum to the class struggle. Read more