Shulamith Firestone... who lit so many sparks of the wonderful 1960s Women's Liberation explosion and beyond.

January 7, 1945 - August 28, 2012 

With sad hearts, we announce the death of Shulamith Firestone, who began Redstockings and coined the group's name with Ellen Willis in early 1969, and a year later, at the age of 25, authored the radical feminist thunderbolt The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution. She was 67 when she died in August in NYC. She now joins Ellen Willis in the Valhalla of warriors for women's freedom.

By the time this courageous organizer-activist, strategist, and theoretician founded Redstockings, she had already helped organize the first two Women's Liberation groups in the US: Chicago Radical Women and, a month later, the sister group Radical Women in New York City. This was in 1967. Six months into 1968, she was the editor of and contributed major articles to the movement's first journal, Notes From the First Year. Click here to read it. She also founded New York Radical Feminists in late 1969 with Anne Koedt, a longtime close radical feminist collaborator, with whom she co-edited Notes From the Second Year.

"Shulie" to her co-workersunderstood and showed better than all of us — went first — in the understanding of why we need a mixture of theory, action, organizing, knowledge of history, and, with this, acknowledged leadership — all at the same time. In 1975, Kathie Sarachild wrote in Redstockings' Feminist Revolution about her realization of how far ahead Shulamith had been about all of this. Click here to read.

In the front lines of radical feminism's first charge, Shulamith suffered shell shock in the turbulent reaction to the publication of her
book and the subsequent media assault and notoriety. Like many, she wrestled with the hard economic times of the 1970s. The careerist
direction she felt the feminist movement was taking disappointed her, with its escapist illusions of individual solutions. She began to feel
there was little hope of radical change in her lifetime and, to the sadness of many, she severed formal ties to the movement. Her health
deteriorated dramatically in the late 1980s, and she endured bouts with mental illness, which she recovered from sufficiently to write about,
along with a few stories of the early days of the movement, in a book published in 1998, Airless Spaces.  

Summer of 1995, from right: Shulamith Firestone, Carol Hanisch, Kathie Sarachild. All were contributors to Notes from the First Year in 1968. Almost three decades later they try to sum up experience and have some fun at North-South Lake, New York. Photo: Dan Harmeling

From time to time, she would contribute to Redstockings actions that seemed crucial to her — for instance, joining in commemorations of movement beacons who died like Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, and Gainesville (Florida) Women's Liberation founder Judith Benninger Brown. In the years after Redstockings established its Women’s Liberation Archives for Action, she began donating her books and other material, which we received with a great feeling of honor and appreciation, and which we are using for analyzing and passing on to new generations primary source lessons from the rebirth years of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the decades that followed.

    So long, Shulamuth — sister, comrade — it’s been SO good to know you. 
And thank you for all you have done to make the world a better place. For women’s liberation and nothing less!
 
— From all in Redstockings, and millions of other women.

For examples of Shulamith Firestone's Women's Liberation action materials from the Redstockings Archives, click here. 

THE MEMORIAL AND MORE

Shulamith's family, friends, and old radical feminist co-conspirators gathered for a memorial on September 23, 2012. It was held in Parish Hall, St. Marks Church in the Bowery near her apartment on New York's Lower East Side (“East Village”), the neighborhood where Shulamith lived for decades and where the earliest “women's liberation” meetings of New York Radical Women were held. Shulamith liked to attend and sometimes participate in poetry readings at St. Marks Church. Its Parish Hall is now home to a bench inscribed with her name, the result of donations collected at the memorial.

Longtime friends of Shulamith, Carol Giardina and Kathie Sarachild of Redstockings, served on the memorial's planning committee, called
together by Laya Firestone Seghi, Shulamith's sister who herself was an early Women's Liberation Movement organizer. For the occasion,
Redstockings created an exhibit of some of the documentary treasures Firestone had given the Redstockings's Archive over the years.

Kathie Sarachild introduced the part of the program devoted to remembrances from Women's Liberation Movement co-workers, and
Marisa Figueiredo spoke in this portion, representing a new generation Redstocking who had worked closely with Shulamith on the book Airless Spaces.

Because of limited seating, the event was not open to the public nor widely announced. Nevertheless, leading radical feminist voices of the 60s managed to get there from far and wide, with Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and Laura X coming all the way from California. Early women's liberation organizers and radical feminists Ti-Grace Atkinson, Roxanne Dunbar, Jo Freeman and Kate Millett spoke, Patricia Mainardi also reading tributes from Anne Koedt and Peggy Dobbins.

For some photos of the gathering, including some of a stunning quilt made by Shulamith, on display at the Memorial as the backdrop for the speakers, click here. At the center of the quilt is sewn a small photographic button of Simone de Beauvoir that Redstockings produced in the 1980s. Just below the button are sewn letters spelling the word “Simone.” Beauvoir's 1948 book The Second Sex inspired so many of the 1960s radical women who set in motion the Women's Liberation Movement, still simmering today. It was to Beauvoir that Shulamith dedicated her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, writing in it “for Simone de Beauvoir who endured.”

•    The printed program for the gathering — available by clicking here — offers more detail, including bios of speakers, and written reminiscences and comments of family, friends, and co-workers.

•     The magazine N+1 helped design and print the program, and then included much of its contents, and some important additional material in a special Shulamith Firestone issue, available both in print and on the journal's website. Click here for the N+1 special issue, Parts I and II.  

•     Remarks by Redstockings speakers Marisa Figueiredo and Kathie Sarachild are available by clicking on their names.

•    You can listen to a recording of the Women's Liberation section of the program, which includes singing by Bev Grant and Lori Hiris, the
tributes by Anne Koedt and Peggy Dobbins, and reflections by Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kate Millet, and Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz in addition to those included in the issue of N+1. Click here for the audio.

•    For a press report on the Memorial and some of its aftermath by Mary Reinholz, who in the early 1970s wrote about the movement for
the New York Daily News, click here. Some more photos from the memorial are in the Reinholz account, as well as a link to The New York Times's obituary.

•    Nona Willis Aronowitz on The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution: Eloquent reflections on reading The Dialectic
of Sex from a young feminist, who is also the daughter of Ellen Willis, Redstockings's other founder and close Shulamith accomplice, were
published on October 19th. For Nona Willis Aronowitz's “The Feminist Manifesto,” click here.

•    For radio interviews on working with Shulamith in the early years of the movement and reflections by another young activist on
Shulamith's impact on today's movement, hear Fran Luck's WBAI interview in September 2012 with Redstocking Kathie Sarachild and
Erin Mahoney of National Women's Liberation. The interviews begin about halfway into the show, which you can access by clicking here. Erin Mahoney also read part of National Women's Liberation's tribute to Shulamith, which you can read in its entirety by clicking here.

MEMORIAL CONFERENCE PLANNED

At the Memorial, Redstockings announced plans for a conference in the next year with a subject and title that provoked friendly laughter and attracted a good number of names on the sign-up sheet: The Shulamith Firestone Women's Liberation Memorial Conference on What Is To Be Done.

We are strongly leaning toward a September date and looking for a New York City location. Stay tuned for more details which will be posted on the Redstockings website and also disseminated more widely. Knowing as much as possible as early as possible about who and how many are interested and can help will make for better planning and a more exciting, productive conference. So will a sufficient till and seed money ahead of time.

You don't have to wait until more information is posted! Get in touch if you're interested in helping and/or attending. And please
contribute any amount you can to help make it happen.

Make a donation HERE or make your check out to Redstockings, Inc. and send it to:

Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement, P.O. Box 7056,
James A. Farley Post Office, New York, NY 10116.

Email us here or write to the above address, if you're interested in
coming and want to help.

The freedom struggle is a learning process!

For the Feminist Revolution that Shulamith and Ellen did so much to move forward — generation teaching generation!

“THIS TIME WE ARE GOING ALL THE WAY”  
— THE REDSTOCKINGS MANIFESTO