“But there were others who wrote her off as a lunatic who would discredit the movement.” [Re. Valerie Solanas]
“Brutally cast out of the revolutionary history she tried to live and imagine…” [Re. Firestone]
Shulamith Firestone wanted to make the story of her struggle with mental illness public, thus she published Airless Spaces (AS) in 1998. Her third book (whether a novel, book of poetry, autobiography or feminist theory, we might never know) was going to continue touching on that topic. And until her death she was intent on preserving every scrap of paper and reports that documented that struggle, not on destroying or hiding them.
Why would she want to save for posterity records that could confirm her ‘mental health status’, such as psychiatric and social workers evaluations?
If she was not ashamed to lay public her illness and, presumably anticipating that someone would finally be interested in writing her biography, kept records about her illness, how come there is a continued blackout, nine years after her death, of meaningful information about her post-Dialectic of Sex (Dialectic from here on) life, the one she spent struggling with the illness? (With the sole dignified exception of Susan Faludi’s article “Death of a Revolutionary”, as far as I know.)
- Was she so absolutely and utterly alone from 1990 to 2012 that there is not one single human being on this planet who witnessed and could attest to anything she did during that period?
- Did Airless Spaces come out of nowhere, ‘miraculously conceived’ and magically printed in 1998 by the power of her ‘lunacy’, or did she have friends who helped her produce and print the book?
Or could it be that intellectual feminists, young and old, don’t care about feminist intersectionality when it comes to mental illness in their ranks, having already dismissed Firestone as one of the 2nd waves’ (using the ‘3rd feminists’ wave’ phrase) “hidebound relics”?
This is no idle talking, ladies. Whenever information and facts about important social problems or important historical personages are missing, the door opens up for ignorance, prejudice, and propaganda to step in and have a party in our minds. They fill the lacunae of information with misinformation, innuendos and stigmatizing opinions. From these dark waters, so to speak, prestigious academicians and the reckless and the heedless intellectuals pick up the highfalutin words to tell the ficticious life-story, in this case, of Firestone.
This is a three parts post. I will be asserting (among other things):
- That there exist two dialectical historical events conspiring together to delete Firestone’s legacy and ‘cancel’ her from the history of feminism.
“the author of Airless Spaces is no longer… even a subject, of feminist history.”
- That there is a direct correlation between Firestone’s mental illness and feminists evicting her from their history, and that Airless Spaces is the link. (In this post.)
- My suggestions for what needs to be done to protect Firestone’s legacy from the acid of prejudice against people with mental illness that exists in the feminists’ camp. Who have her story (many people) and how to collect that story so that the public have an alternative story to the one the wrecking bunch is passing them. (Third post)
The two events I referred to above are:
- The arrival of the 3rd and 4th ‘feminist waves’, carrying the usual bag of feminists’ fears.
- Fears of losing academic ‘assignments’ if they appear to be anti-men, as Shulamith was labeled by both the patriiarchy and feminists;
- fear of misogynist male physical violence;
- fear of being ridiculed publicly for expounding radical theories about the patriarchy;
- fear of being ostracized if they look as attacking the hetero-supremacist institutions of marriage and motherhood, as Shulamith was;
- and probably the worst, fear of losing academic prestige or even evicted from feminist history if they get too close and intimate with the work of the woman they have already discredited as anti-men and mentally ill. You can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together if you break him, can you?
- The documented long history of the 2nd wavers antipathy for the presence of women with mental illness in their rank. It has culminating today in the unstated but practiced disavowal of Airless Spaces as worthy of the feminist gaze, unless it is to demean it, because it is about mental illness in their rank.
I call these two events dialectical because they are two contradictory forces at ‘war’ with each other but acting together towards the same goal: self-annihilation by consciously and actively working to defame and destroy the feminist movement as we knew it, and expelling Firestone from their history.
Whether this is intentional or a consequence of careless feminists writing styles and lack of self-criticism is for the reader to decide.
About the first point, fears of losing prestige, I will advance that it is not new nor a paranoid thought with zero bases on reality or history. The opposite looks more like it.
But there were others who wrote her off as a lunatic who would discredit the movement.
“Furthermore, it is somewhat dangerous even to discuss the topic of feminist anguish without jeopardizing the fragile hold feminist scholars have on their jobs as researhers [sic] and teachers (Westkott, 1979, p. 430; Bernard, 1981, p._17).” In ‘Exploring Clinical Methods for Social Research’ 1985
Finally, I have this to say to the intellectual feminists. If you are determined in evicting Firestone from feminist history and destroying that history, you must provide good reasons. Don’t expect academia and college degrees will protect you from the debris falling around you. Eventually you will be ashamed of the things you wrote today.
Then you will spend half your life trying to cover it all up and explaining to the younger generation (who will want to delete yours in turn, no matter what good you did) how could you have been so silly.
Please, read now my short page ‘Feminists’ zugzwang: the reason I’m ‘picking’ on feminists of academia.’
PART 1: THE PATH TOWARDS OBLIVION
As I said in the first paragraph, Shulamith Firestone wanted to make her struggle with mental illness public. By the absence of public factual information about her life since her death nine years ago, one would think that her story, the one she wanted to tell, died with her.
Not worthy of a biography
Today, 51 years after ‘The Dialectics of Sex’ was published, Shulamith Firestone’s name doesn’t ring a bell to the general public, nor to most women – old or young- who consider themselves feminists or are in the process of deciding whether they are feminists or not ( third and fourth ‘wavers’, i.e.). For the public to know who she was they need the facts of her life, but, astonishingly, the feminists of academia have published not one single biographical book about this remarkable woman in 51 years.
The value of things depends on our attitude towards them.
From 1975 to 1998 (when AS was published), the only ‘fact’ they gave the public about Firestone was that “she went crazy and disappeared due to her mental illness”. Then there was silence again until she died in 2012 when they updated their ‘research’ that year to include “she died alone, her body found days after her death”. That’s it.
But she was not alone all through 1975 to 2012. Other people and I were with her the last 20 years of her life. How come writers of academia don’t know about this? They should know it because Shulamith’s friends and family know it, and some intellectual feminists attended her eulogy. But her story never came out. They silenced the silence after her death.
Let me pose a few more questions to you, the ones I keep asking myself.
- How would the studious feminists of academia account to the public for these facts, that Shulamith Firestone has no name-recognition among the public and that not one of them have written a biographical book about her in 51 years?
- How do they explain her appearing (inconveniently for them) in 1998 like a ghost with a new book in her hands – ‘Airless Spaces’ (AS) after basically having given her up for dead?
- Finally, how do they justify the fact that after her Phoenixlike reappearance they still show no interest in her life (except to evict her from history), show no curiosity about where was she all these years, and explain how, if she was so utterly ‘crazy’ and alone, she managed to write and publish AS?
Someone or some people must have helped her, which means that she could not have been alone. It’s in the acknowledgment; didn’t you read it? Seven names of people who facilitated the conditions for her to write and publish the book. She was not always alone, ladies. Please, stop echoing that falsity.
Clearly, there is a lot missing in the ‘reports’ from feminists of academia about her, and about their silence all these years.
It is possible that, as I’m writing this, finally there are some brave academicians writing or trying to write a biography of Firestone. Until it comes out, the criticisms here still hold.
The Connection Between Mental Illness As An Invalidating Stigma And Feminists Is Direct.
Feminists writing unsympathetic myths about Firestone
So for 51 years up to today there are no real facts out there about her life, but the learned feminists feel empowered by their erudition and PhDs (especially the young ones) to comment about ‘AS’ without any knowledge about her life or how the book came to be, with no context, i.e. I’ll give you two examples of how this lack of information leads academicians to write unsubstantiated opinions that hurt Firestone’s reputation and the ‘movement’, sometimes intentionally and out of meanness, sometimes out of just plain lack of self-criticism.
Example #1
The first example of the latter type is a paper by Kathi Weeks, ‘The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s’. (2015) This is actually a muy interesting paper. Her discussion was going swimmingly until she decided,, for some reason that escapes me, to compare AS to Dialectic,. This is something being done today by just about every intellectual feminist out there. It’s like comparing, I don’t know, your very first kiss to each one that followed the rest of your life?
Of course AS is going to come out short compared to Dialectic! They are two different things. But it is on this basis, that AS is about her illness, that Firestone is being kicked out of feminist’s history. On the date Airless Spaces appeared, on that date she expired like a can of Campbell soup.
In her paper the connection between Firestone’s mental illness as an invalidating stigma and feminism is direct.
“the author of Airless Spaces is no longer… even a subject, of feminist history.” (Weeks)
But there’s more. The lack of information out there about her seems to be no impediment to judge and condemn her to oblivion.
“ the time of the diary [AS, i.e.] is constricted, spanning the most recent past to the immediate present;” Idem.
Firstly, the span of AS is not “the most recent past”. AS actually includes references to long past relations with family members and friends and even to Valerie Solanas. How is that “spanning the most recent past”?
But more important, even if AS covered from Firestone’s first hospitalization in 1987, then from there to 2015, when Kathi Weeks wrote her paper, there is a span of time of 28 years. On what information about Shulamith in that “constricted” span of time did Weeks based her sweeping judgment that Firestone is no longer part of the feminist history?
Answer: on nothing but on the book Airless Spaces itself, on the fact that it speaks about a feminist with mental illness; that mental illness disqualifies you as a feminist.
FYI: I’m not saying that Kathi Weeks is doing this intentionally or out of meanness towards Firestone. I know she is not, especially since it seems to me that she actually intuits that something is missing out there.
“But most interesting to me, and the primary impetus for this essay, is how both the author and the text are simultaneously present in and absent from our histories, at once acknowledged as central yet marginalized;” Idem.
Disappointingly, she can’t put two and two together, even though it’s right there in her own paper. Or maybe she’s afraid of going there.
Language of stigma
Most intellectuals are very good at covering prejudice, racism and stigma with fancy ‘logic’ and ‘reasoning’ sentences, consciously or subconsciously. While the uneducated public would use words like ‘crazy’ or ‘bunkers’ to describe AS, feminists, not only Weeks, use fancy words/adjectives and phrases like the following in every ‘critique’ of it. These are words carrying the stereotype that all people with mental illness are all the time not intelligent and incapable of putting down in paper a coherent thought.
- Unsystematic
- Minimally organized
- No order or meaning
- Tiny
- Constricted
- Despair-filled
- Fragmentary
I know, it sounds like this post. 🙂
Again, I know Weeks is not implying that, consciously, but it is what one gets after doing a basic subtext reading of all the reasons she gives for why AS is inferior to Dialectic and disqualifies Firestone from history. Words carry meaning and emotions, no matter how well you (general ‘you’) delude yourself with the idea that because you are an intellectual, you can strip words and language out of their emotional DNA. It’s the curse of the human mind; we can hardly hide what is in our minds and hearts; our actions and chosen words speak for us.
Example #2: : out of my cold, um, hands
So, there’s nothing out there, period, on which to base a knowledgeable and trustworthy opinion or critique about Shulamith post-Dialectic life. Basically, the intellectuals are passing to the public their uninformed opinions as facts and as ‘informed feminist critique” when these are anything but.
And to boot, many of their opinions about AS actually reflect scorn and anger at her for daring to write about her experience with mental illness (and shaming them in the process?) instead of writing ‘Dialectic of Sex Part 2’. It’s their usual antipathy towards people with mental illness in their ranks.
Airless Spaces “seems designed explicitly to discourage sympathy” [for her and the mentally ill, i.e.]
Sianne Ngai “Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces” discussed in my old blog post
She is like the sun, minus the warmth.
Check this comment by Sophie Lewis in The Nation.
“Her big second book…never arrived. Instead, in 1998, a follow-up text appeared at last: Airless Spaces, a tiny, fragmentary, despair-filled collection of stories about the psychiatric incarceration of Shulie and other inmates.
Sounds correct, doesn’t it. But can you do the subtext reading of that quote on your own? Here, let me help you.
“Her big second book” is sarcasm and derision; “instead” is a word indicating ‘disappointment’ that AS was written at all; “a follow-up text” says that AS is not a book, is a ‘continuation’ of Dialectic, which by association makes it a product of her ‘inferior mentally ill mind’; “tiny” because, again, it’s not a book and the size tells you it has no value. Now comes the part where the educated feminist critique unleashes her unchecked prejudism with stigmatizing innuendos: “fragmentary” because people with the illness can’t think straight and Shulamith became, aparently in her perception, irrational and incapable of writing with coherence once she became mentally ill; “despair-filled” as in ‘soaked in the damn disgusting thing’. And of course, the “tiny” book “appeared” as by magic.
The author could find nothing else in her ‘critique’ but disgusting despair. Never a comment (from any feminists) of surprise or joy to the fact that she “appeared” when everybody had given her up for dead (when Ngai published her paper Shulamith was still alive). Never a sign of compassion for the suffering of a feminist sister. It is as if instead of a heart, their chest is just an empty airless space.
You don’t have to like it and maybe there is something to their analysis, but the point is that the analysis is always expressed with veiled contempt. The unstated opinion is that feminists’ books about mental illness are not only of no interest to the academicians but should not be a topic of feminism. And as with all intellectual feminists, Ms. Lewis too had to compare AS to Dialectic.
These women were waiting for the ‘second coming of Firestone’ and decided to crucify her for showing up with AS. 🙂
Unrelatable
My impression after reading various essays and articles about AS is that some feminists can’t see feminist politics in ‘AS’ because they can’t relate to the pain nor understand the language of those burden with mental illness. Either that or they are just obsessed with destroying AS and all evidence of her mental illness.
Maybe that’s why no one wants to write her biography; maybe because patriarchy forbid them to write about ‘that woman’. Maybe that’s why Shulamith insisted on recording her struggles.
If you had had the honor and privilege of meeting Firestone in the 1990s, as I did, you (general ‘you’) wouldn’t be making these tragic conclusions about her intellect and questioning her feminist ‘credentials’. But you do it because you literally know nothing about her as a person and as a human being. You only have what amounts to gossip to paint a picture of this remarkable woman. That’s not your fault, Ms. Weeks.
The personal is political, that too went out the window with Firestone courtesy of today’s libertarian-brand of feminism, especially if the personal is mentally ill.
What I resent the most is that people with so much education and power to influence the public are so careless and thoughtless with how they use their communications skills. But then again, maybe it is all intentionally.
SUMMARY
Filling the blanks
So that’s how the intellectual feminists are filling the gap of information about Shulamith. They are using Airless Spaces as their only source, using the “tiny” book itself as a symbol that mental illness will disqualify you as member of any feminist project no matter your contributions to humanity in the past or present.
Was there any other way of phrasing their disappointment at AS other than basically trashing it and trying to shame her publicly, like the men of patriarchy in the media did to her in the 1970s? The feminists have declared her a fallen icon, only because she was mentally ill. Are these highly educated authors so careless in their ‘critique’ as to not noticing they are expressing the usual prejudice and stigma about people with mental illness the way it is always done: seldom directly, always implied?
What are they trying to achieve by denigrating Shulamith and AS? These attacks have a purpose, they are not in a political vaccum. Are they using mental illness as a weapon to destroy her because of her radical theory quesitoning patriarchy’s power and they have to play by ‘his’ rules in academia? I will cover these questions in the next post about the waves of feminism.
Conclusion
PAST HISTORY
It is no secret that since the 1960s feminists have being afraid of the practice by male propaganda of labeling them as ‘crazy/mad women’. It is a recognition (conscious or not) of the devastating harm that prejudice and stigma have on people with mental illness. It discredits the person’s total humanity, her character, without gradation or consideration to past history of accomplishments, as irrational and stupid, unworthy of being taken seriously, and worthy of social ostracism.
Consider, for example, that even if you (as a feminist) are not mentally ill, you still get labeled and stigmatized as one: ‘crazy, mad feminist’. Now imagine if someone among you is mentally ill: what are you gonna do with her? Hide her in shame? Deny to others, yourself and her that her suffering is probably caused by mental illness? Would you demand that she ‘snap out of it’?
“Please get your act together and take an interest. Get with it…burying your head in the sand isn’t going to help.”
Kate Millet quoted in Susan Faludi’s “Death of a Revolutionary”. (p.61)
Prejudice and stigma has consequences for its victims, and most of the time they are ‘invisible’ because they are designed to pass as something other than prejudice and stigma. One of its universal characteristics is that those who engage in any of its variants –physical or verbal (sometimes both at the same time) – deny they are doing it.
That’s precisely what makes prejudice a formidable problem to defeat.
You would think that the intellectual feminists with so many years of academic learning would be aware of this after, what, 170 years of women struggles organized in a‘feminist movement’ historically burdened with the stigma of ‘angry crazies’. But they are not, and it seems they won’t. They are too busy bringing down the house.
NEXT: Fear of intimacy with Firestone in the 3rd wave
Airless Spaces and mental illness 