A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 431ideas like “the personal is political”—meaning that the way men and women
interacted in their private lives had a much larger political meaning, that the
same unequal relationships existed in the home and in society in general. She
published articles like “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” making sex a
political issue, but much differently than men like Kinsey or Hefner had. Her
major contribution was a 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, which used, or rein-
terpreted, male philosophers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Sigmund
Freud to argue that a “sexual caste system” was more profound than any other
social or economic classification. The traditional family, in which women had
subordinate roles in taking care of me, was the basis of women’s oppression,
she wrote. “Unless revolution uproots... the biological family... the tape-
worm of exploitation will never be annihilated.” Pregnancy, she said, was
“barbaric”; childbirth was like “shitting a pumpkin”; and childhood was a
“supervised nightmare.” She knew her views would be controversial, among
women as well as men. “This is painful,” she acknowledged, “but no matter
how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes
deeper.” The basis of radical feminism, then, was based on getting to the very
roots of the problem, Firestone told women.
“The end goal of feminist revolution must be,” she advised, “unlike that of
the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of
the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no
longer matter culturally.” Firestone’s conclusion truly raised the ire of many
of her readers and critics, again male and female alike. She envisioned a world
where sex would not be necessary to bear children, where artificial reproduc-
tion outside the womb might take place, thus making men unnecessary. She
wanted children to have “the right of immediate transfer” so they could
remove themselves from environments with abusive adults. While many of
her ideas seemed extreme, her views on ending the idea of exclusively “male”
work and traditional marriage, and establishing children’s rights have come to
pass.
Less militantly than Firestone’s ideas, women at the University of Chicago
seized a building to protest the firing of a radical feminist professor. Later, the
“February Sisters” took over the Asian Studies Building to highlight griev-
ances over the lack of health care and day care at the University of Kansas,
and shortly afterwards the administration acted on these issues and established
a Women’s Studies department as well. Women’s publications like Off Our