Quotes from book
The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex
Shulamith Firestone

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution is a book by the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. Written over a few months when Firestone was 25, it has been described as a classic of feminist thought.Firestone argues that the "sexual class system" predates and runs deeper than any other form of oppression, and that the eradication of sexism will require a radical reordering of society: "The first women are fleeing the massacre, and, shaking and tottering, are beginning to find each other. ... This is painful: no matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere. ... feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature."The goal of the feminist revolution, she wrote, must be "not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself" so that genital differences no longer have cultural significance.

“Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child - That? Why you can't change that! You must be out of your mind!”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

is the closest to the truth. http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“There is some irony in the fact that children imagine that parents can do what they want, and parents imagine that children do. "When I grow up..." parallels "Oh to be a child again..."”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

http://books.google.com/books?id=YnY10fNqqp4C&q=%22There+is+some+irony+in+the+fact+that+children+imagine+that+parents+can+do+what+they+want+and+parents+imagine+that+children+do+When+I+grow+up+parallels+Oh+to+be+a+child+again%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“The myth of childhood has an even greater parallel in the myth of Femininity. Both women and children were considered asexual and thus"purer" than man. Their inferior status was ill-concealed under an elaborate "respect."”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

One didn't discuss serious matters nor did one curse in from of women and children; one didn't openly degrade them, one did it behind their backs.

Chapter Four
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“There is some irony in the fact that children imagine that parents can do what they want, and parents imagine that children do.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

http://books.google.com/books?id=YnY10fNqqp4C&q=%22There+is+some+irony+in+the+fact+that+children+imagine+that+parents+can+do+what+they+want+and+parents+imagine+that+children+do+When+I+grow+up+parallels+Oh+to+be+a+child+again%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“If we had to name the one cultural current that most characterizes America in the twentieth century, it might be the work of Freud and the disciplines that grew out of it.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Four

“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. It's aim: 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 an undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Two, "On American Feminism

“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 book The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure. For love, perhaps even more thanchildbearing, is the pivot of women's oppression today.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Six

“Radical Feminism. The two positions we have described usually generate a third, the radical feminist position: The women in its ranks range from disillusioned moderate feminists from NOW to disillusioned leftists from the women's liberation movement., and include others who had been waiting for just such an alternative, women for whom neither conservative bureaucratic feminism nor warmed-over leftist dogma had much appeal.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Three

“In the Middle Ages there was no such thing as childhood. The medieval view of children was profoundly different from ours.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Four

“The assumption that, beneath economics, reality is psychosexual is often rejected as ahistorical by those who accept a dialectical materialist view of history because it seems to land us back where Marx began: groping through a fog of utopian hypotheses, philosophical systems that might be right, that might be wrong (there is no way to tell); systems that explain concrete historical developments by a priori categories of thought; historical materialism, however, attempted to explain 'knowing' by 'being' and not vice versa.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“Women have been allowed to achieve individuality only though their appearance.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“Because class oppression of women and children couched in the phraseology of "cute" it is much harder to fight than open oppression.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Four

“Contemporary slang reflects this animal state: children are "mice," "rabbits," "kittens," women are called "chicks," in England "birds," "hens," "dumb clucks," "silly geese," "old mares," "bitches."”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Similar terminology is used about males as a defamation of character, or more broadly only about pressed males males: stud, wold, cat, stag, jack - and then it is used much more rarely, and often with a specifically sexual connotation.

Chapter Four
The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

“We can also see the class basis of the emerging concept of child hood in the system of child education that came in along with it. If childhood was only an abstract concept, then the modern school was the institution that built it into reality.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Four

“Freudianism and Feminism grew from the same soil. It is no accident that Freud began his work at the height of the early feminist movement.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Three

“Though the sex class system may have originated in fundamental biological conditions, this does not guarantee once the biological basis of their oppression has been swept away that women and children will be freed.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter One

“To grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the Kingdom of Nature does not reign absolute.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter One

“Constant erotic stimulation of male sexuality coupled with its forbidden release through most normal channels are designed to encourage men to look at women as only things whose resistance to entrance must be overcome.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex (1970)

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