The Good Friday Agreement. The Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The Oslo Accords. All intended to resolve long and complex battles around imperialism, racism and religion. Widely hailed in the day, the passage of time has demonstrated that they are nowhere near as sturdy as they were made out to be.
Likewise, the processed rebranding of feminism in the same period would lead to think pieces asking if the movement was dead. It was also the decade whenever the sex wars that had engulfed feminism from the 70’s onwards (thanks to the likes of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon) were effectively halted thanks to the likes of Camille Paglia. Ultimately these processes would lead to a zombified revival in the 2010’s where trans issues would further splinter the movement.
Such battles have their roots in the 1960’s
And one name that could be found in that milieu was Shulamith Firestone.
The New Yorker wrote that:
Firestone had been one of the most outspoken and audacious leaders of the radical-feminist movement, the small but influential group of women who spun off from the male-dominated New Left in the late nineteen-sixties to propose a fundamental transformation of political and private life on the basis of gender equality. Both an organizer and an intellectual, she wrote some of the movement’s foundational tracts—including contributions to Notes, the annual periodical of the New York Radical Women that she founded, like the widely read 1968 essay “The Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.: A New View.” She also founded radical-feminist organizing groups, first in Chicago and then in New York, and led protests in a theatrical, irreverent Yippie style. The feminist Susan Faludi noted in an obituary that Firestone’s peers called her ‘the firebrand,’ and sometimes ‘the fireball.’ Even by the standards of the late-sixties radical milieu, she was unusually intense.
However, within a few years, she walked away from feminism due to a variety of issues (in-fighting, being usurped in groups she founded, a general sense that feminism had failed), developed mental health issues and fell into obscurity. By 1998, with the support of friends, she completed Airless Spaces. Although a work of fiction, the focus on patients in mental health wards, aging revolutionaries, old friends and living in the empty space and time that was the pre 2000 end of history.
Since Antonin Artaud, the mentally ill are easy to pity and admire because we believe that they can see beyond the veneer of society and that madness is a form of truth (think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as the most obvious example). With Firestone, such people are unlikable and unreasonable: her characters are suspicious and contemptuous of the doctors and nurses working in said institutions as well as old and new acquaintances. They are suspicious of doctors and angry at their few remaining friends. It’s a sad way to live and a frustrating one. No wonder Elizabeth Wurtzel described depression as the ultimate in selfishness.
Writing for Jacobin, Jess Cotton highlights these contradictions:
Airless Spaces brings to light a problem at the heart of Firestone’s first book, The Dialectic of Sex. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists advanced critiques of orthodox forms of psychiatric care, which they believed pathologized the expression of women’s dissatisfaction with the seemingly immovable institutions of marriage and motherhood and contributed to the suppression of feminist revolt. Many of these criticisms dovetailed with the anti-psychiatry movement that was gaining momentum in Europe and the United States, and which led to deinstitutionalization. Asylums, and other forms of long-term psychiatric provision, were deeply flawed, and often violent, models of care. But what was designed to supersede them never materialized. The community care model that the state proposed as their replacement offered short-term initiatives, and, like most forms of care in the United States, was rapidly privatized.
This has led some to see Airless Spaces as a kind of post-mortem on 60’s feminism. While there’s undoubtedly some merit to that view, it means that the characters that populate the chapters are discarded and dismissed in the manner that they feel accustomed to in the book, which is a dreadful irony. What their actions and thoughts show is that, in the so called “caring 90’s”, they were detached from society in a meaningful way and left adrift to navigate a world that hadn’t changed beyond recognition but was different enough for there to be struggles. Being middle aged, poor and mentally ill wasn’t a recipe for progression and nor was it guaranteed that the system would pay attention to you.
Reissued earlier this year, Airless Spaces reminds us to say no to processed progress.
Shulamith Firestone, 2025, Airless Spaces. Semiotext(e). ISBN-13: 978-1635902518
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
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