Firestone is very interesting, and very brave. A radical feminist and socialist. Let me get my falling apart book out here.
Lets see, she has a chapter called "Racism and the family of Man, comparing a women's struggle to that of a black males; "The woman has no real hope of her own for her self-determined struggle, for her it's all lost from the beginning: she is defined in toto as the appendage of the white man, she lives under his day to day surveillance isolated from her sisters: she has less aggressive strength.
This chapter is a discussion of women's attempt to identify with the Black movement of the time and is quite profound--if uncomfortable reading at times.
Her early chapters discusses De Beauvoir and others in an awesome discussion of class analysis and biological differences: "We have attempted to take the class analysis one step further to its roots in the biological division of the sexes. We have not thrown out the insights of the socialists; on the contrary, radical feminism enlarges their analysis, granting it an even deeper basis in objective conditions and thereby explaining many of its insolubles. As the groundwork for our own analysis we shall expand Engals' definition of historical materialism. Here is the definition we have already quoted above, rephrased to include the biological division of the sexes for the purpose of reproduction, which lies at the origins of class:
Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another; in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction and child are; in the related development of other physically-differentiated classes [castes]; and in the first division of labor based on sex which developed into the [economic] class system."
So, you know those types who say its all about class systems and not gender systems? She wipes he floor with them in the first couple of chapters. For a work of philosophy it's fairly easy to read, yet I doubt our critical friends would bother or understand if they did.
= new reply since forum marked as read
