Vivian Gornick on Shulamith Firestone’s portraits of madness, in Boston Review:
When I was a girl in the 1950s women, for the most part, got married, gave birth, and stayed home; if necessary, they went to work as schoolteachers or secretaries or salesgirls. They did not enter the professions, start a business, serve in government, or become university professors; nor did they climb a telephone pole, go down in the mines, or compete in a marathon. Today a girl is born with the knowledge that not only can she do any or all of the above, it is even assumed that she will pursue a working life as well as a domestic one. The change in social expectations for women, nothing short of monumental, is due to the Second Wave of American feminism (otherwise known as the Women’s Liberation Movement), a political and social development characterized by the twin efforts of liberals who worked throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s to achieve equality for women under the law and radicals who worked to eradicate deep-dyed, historic sexism through a change in cultural consciousness. Among the leading figures in this second group was Shulamith Firestone, of whom it was said, “I think of her as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky, and then she disappeared.” That’s exactly how I remember her.
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