Shulamith Firestone Quotes

#1. A mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort 'belongs' to her.

Shulamith Firestone

#2. 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

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

Shulamith Firestone

#4. The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance.

Shulamith Firestone

#5. 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

#6. For the real issue under all the fights about other women is the man is unable to commit himself.

Shulamith Firestone

#7. The end goal of feminist revolution must be ... not just the elimination of male privilage but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

Shulamith Firestone

#8. The bar is the male kingdom. For centuries it was the bastion of male privilege, the gathering place for men away from their women, a place where men could go to freely indulge in The Bull Session.

Shulamith Firestone

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

Shulamith Firestone

#10. Whichever it is, he does not question it, not understanding that his own behavior has been or could be a determining influence.

Shulamith Firestone

#11. 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

#12. The personal is political.

Shulamith Firestone

#13. 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

#14. Childbirth is at best necessary and tolerable. It is not fun.
(Like shitting a pumpkin, a friend of mine told me when I inquired about the Great-Experience-You-Are-Missing.)

Shulamith Firestone

#15. [U]nless oppressed groups stick together, and on alliances of self interest rather than do-goodism; nothing can be accomplished in the long run to dismantle the apparatus of oppression.

Shulamith Firestone

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

Shulamith Firestone

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

Shulamith Firestone

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

Shulamith Firestone

#19. To be worshiped is not freedom.

Shulamith Firestone

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

Shulamith Firestone

#21. He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies.

Shulamith Firestone

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

Shulamith Firestone

#23. Believe me, if all wives whose husbands had affairs left them, we would only have divorced women in this country.

Shulamith Firestone

#24. It is only the failure of my plots I fear.

Shulamith Firestone

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

Shulamith Firestone

#26. No matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper.

Shulamith Firestone

#27. 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

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

Shulamith Firestone

#29. Men are thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are occupied with love.

Shulamith Firestone

#30. The pervasion of image has so deeply altered our very relationships to ourselves that even men have become objects
if never erotic objects.

Shulamith Firestone

#31. Thus her whole identity hangs in the balance of her love life. She is allowed to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love.

Shulamith Firestone

#32. 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

#33. The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF!

Shulamith Firestone

#34. New theories and new movements do not develop in a vacuum, they arise to spearhead the necessary social solutions to new problems resulting from contradictions in the environment.

Shulamith Firestone

#35. Love has never been understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated.

Shulamith Firestone

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

Shulamith Firestone

#37. 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

#38. All men are selfish, brutal and inconsiderate
and I wish I could find one.

Shulamith Firestone