Shulamith Firestone Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

The classic trap for any revolutionary is always, 'What's your alternative?'

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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.

Shulamith Firestone
This is painful, no matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper.

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

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.

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

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
Marx was on to something more profound than he knew when he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within the society and state.

Shulamith Firestone
The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

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

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

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

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

Shulamith Firestone