Julie Phillips
In her 1998 book, Shulamith Firestone, author of the classic feminist text The Dialectic of Sex, chronicles mental illness and
institutionalization with dark humor.
Airless Spaces, by Shulamith Firestone,
Semiotext(e), 227 pages, $14.95
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One of Shulamith Firestone’s most radical suggestions, from her feminist manifesto The Dialectic of Sex—even more unthinkable than proposing that babies be gestated in artificial wombs or stating that “childhood is hell”—was that women really look at how heterosexual love has failed them. To assert, in 1970, that romance was a male power grab was to pull the rug out from under men’s and women’s lives. “Women and Love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture,” she wrote, adding, “The panic felt at any threat to love is a good clue to its political significance.”
That panic is still with us. It echoes in shocked reactions to South Korea’s 4B movement, in which straight women swear off marriage and sex. “Tradwives” and “incels” sense it, hence their efforts to game the love trade by submission or force. But by the time Firestone wrote The Dialectic, as a twenty-five-year-old artist and radical feminist leader, she wasn’t afraid of scaring people. By then, she had suffered enough in relationships with men, starting with her domineering, Orthodox Jewish father and her beloved brother, who followed their father into fundamentalism and beat her for breaking the Sabbath. It wasn’t just the violence: women didn’t get back what they gave. “(Male) culture was built on the love of women, and at their expense. . . . (Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.”
The second-wave feminist answer, liberation, was both not enough and too much. Famously, the groups Firestone cofounded—New York Radical Women, the Redstockings, and others—were torn apart by their members’ desire for freedom, their fear of dominance, their longing for control. Outrage seeks an enemy, and the justifiably outraged women who became activists—many of them inspired by books like Firestone’s to analyze the workings of power in their lives—turned their newfound bravado on each other. The most brilliant found themselves challenged by their acolytes and isolated by the sheer force of their vision and vehemence. Firestone withdrew from the fight. Alone in a fifth-floor studio apartment on East Tenth Street—the kind of rent-stabilized cubbyhole that is impossible to leave but too small for a full adult life—she eventually suffered a nervous breakdown. A few years later, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
As she went in and out of the institutions to which she was involuntarily committed, Firestone turned to writing about her own life as a daughter, an activist, and, mostly, a person contending with mental illness. This became her second book, Airless Spaces, published by Semiotext(e) in 1998. Now these stories have been reissued, with a sensitive introduction by Chris Kraus and including “Death of a Revolutionary,” Susan Faludi’s 2013 New Yorker account of Firestone’s troubled life.
What drives these intense, affecting stories is Firestone’s capacity for analysis, diverted now from the problems of society to those of individual survival. In her telling, it makes complete sense for a woman’s daily struggle to open packets of plastic cutlery to land her in the hospital, like a Hunger Artist of the disposable age. And it makes sense, given that the water in one’s apartment has “116 different poisons in it,” to refuse to take a shower. This narrator—institutionalized; bathed by force; her long, beautiful hair cut off—ends up seeing herself as a new person, one who looks “like a mental patient, not an attractive woman who just happened to be thrown into a mental hospital.”
Like Bette Howland, who chronicled her stay in a mental hospital in her 1974 classic W-3, Firestone looks at the other inmates in curiosity and surprise and sees them as both patients and themselves. Even when on the outside, the solitary alter egos who narrate Airless Spaces think too much. What am I going to eat, when is it time to wash my clothes? They have that inward obsessiveness that comes with maintenance work when it’s only oneself being maintained.
Firestone has a streak of dark humor, too. In the first fragment, a dream about being on a sinking ocean liner, she flees the hysterical gaiety on the upper decks “down some metal stairs to where people were starting to get their pants legs wet.” There she hides in a refrigerator, “hoping to live on even after the boat was fully submerged until it should be found.”
In another scene, a woman goes to a Christmas party for a home health-care company and finds herself in the absurd situation of making small talk with a doctor who had previously had her committed. When he asks inanely how she’s doing, they both dismiss qualifications like “happy” or “content” to settle, finally, on “stabilized.”
One protagonist, wise to the ways of mental institutions, advises a new patient that if you’re involuntarily committed, the best way to get out “is to have people on the outside rooting for you. Have someone call about you repeatedly and say you are needed.” Faludi believes it was the lack of such support that made radicals like Firestone vulnerable to mental illness: divided from each other, they went down with the ship of their own solitude. When Firestone became “stabilized,” Faludi writes, it was because a group of young women gathered around her who knew and had benefited from her work. They took her on trips, brought her to lunch, helped her stay on her meds. Along with Firestone’s sister Laya, they gave her the community she needed.
But a community that comes together freely can too easily fall apart, and feminism still hasn’t found structural answers to the problem of lonely liberation. When some members of her support group moved away, Firestone stopped managing her illness and relapsed. She died in 2012, age sixty-seven, alone in her studio, as if in the drowned refrigerator, in an airless space, waiting to be found.
Julie Phillips’s most recent book is The Baby on the Fire Escape, on mothering and creative work.