Airless Spaces
Shulamith Firestone
Semiotext(e), $17.95 (paper)

When I was a girl in the 1950s women, for the most part, got married, gave birth, and stayed home; if necessary, they went to work as schoolteachers or secretaries or salesgirls. They did not enter the professions, start a business, serve in government, or become university professors; nor did they climb a telephone pole, go down in the mines, or compete in a marathon. Today a girl is born with the knowledge that not only can she do any or all of the above, it is even assumed that she will pursue a working life as well as a domestic one. The change in social expectations for women, nothing short of monumental, is due to the Second Wave of American feminism (otherwise known as the Women’s Liberation Movement), a political and social development characterized by the twin efforts of liberals who worked throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s to achieve equality for women under the law and radicals who worked to eradicate deep-dyed, historic sexism through a change in cultural consciousness. Among the leading figures in this second group was Shulamith Firestone, of whom it was said, “I think of her as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky, and then she disappeared.” That’s exactly how I remember her.

Although I, too, was a Second Wave feminist, I functioned in the Movement more as a writer than a group-oriented activist. In fact, I first met Shulamith when I interviewed her for my first feminist piece for the Village Voice. I can still see her that day in 1969, sitting in the kitchen of her fourth-floor Lower East Side walk-up—small, fierce, large dark eyes peering out at me from the middle of that extraordinary mane of waist-length black hair—answering my every question with the rapid-fire rhetorical skill that marked her every utterance. It was no surprise to me when, the following year, her first book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution was published and I, along with the rest of the world, felt the full force of her Talmudic brilliance. What was a surprise was how quickly after the book’s publication she seemed to disappear from feminist politics, not to be heard from again (publicly, that is) until Airless Spaces—a work as shockingly concrete as Dialectic had been magisterially theoretical—was published in 1998, and the world also learned of how tormented the years in between had been for Shulamith. Now, Airless Spaces is being published anew, and having read it again for the first time in all these years, I am again amazed to feel the remarkable strength of mind and spirit with which Shulamith greeted every experience that life threw at her.

She was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in January of 1945 into a family of Orthodox Jewish Americans, then raised in St. Louis, Missouri. The father was a domestic tyrant, a man of raging righteousness who governed with an iron hand; but Shulamith, the second child in a brood of six, proved more than a match for him, defying his arbitrary rule from earliest life, possessed as she was of a temperament much like his own. Very young, Shulamith felt the unfairness inherent in having been born female. Once, during her teenage years, her father commanded her to make her brother’s bed; when she asked why she must do this, she was told, “Because you’re a girl,” whereupon Shulamith flew into a rage of such severity one of her sisters thought that either she would murder their father or he would murder her.

She thought incessantly about the cultural subordination that doomed a woman to a life of secondary experience, and she read, read, read—Marx, Freud, Beauvoir—applying all she learned to this problem, concluding quite early that what women needed was a theory of sexual domination equal to that of class theory itself. As her ideas clarified, so too did her single-minded, almost visionary concentration on how to bring about organized protest on behalf of women’s rights. 

In September 1967, along with two thousand other New Left activists, Shulamith attended the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago. Here, she met Jo Freeman, already an activist on behalf of women, and together they crafted a resolution demanding equitable marital and property laws, control by women of their own bodies, and a 51 percent representation of women on the conference floor. When they, together with a few other budding feminists, approached the conference director with the request that their resolution be added to the agenda, he laughed. “Cool down, little girl,” he said, actually patting Shulamith on the head. “We have more important things to talk about than women’s problems.” The women repaired to Freeman’s apartment and there and then the first women’s liberation group in Chicago was formed. A month later Shulamith moved to New York, where she quickly helped found two of the earliest and most important movement groups—New York Radical Women, which invented consciousness raising, and Redstockings, which concentrated on history from a feminist perspective. Months later, she also helped found New York Radical Feminists, by which time similar groups had begun to sprout across the entire country, and within the year the Women’s Liberation Movement was born.

Shulamith’s superior intelligence in combination with her inflamed temperament made her an instant take-charge person in whatever group she joined or helped form; this also made her a person both revered and resented. In the late Sixties, she was often experienced in her women’s groups first as a leader of great command and then as an autocratic power seeker. Whatever the political vicissitudes of her life, no one could separate Shulamith from her need to go on thinking about women’s historic subordination or her determination to organize those thoughts into a written document. In 1970 she published The Dialectic of Sex, and with it made cultural history.

The Dialectic of Sex essentially posits that woman’s subordinate place in virtually every cultural development from time immemorial can be traced to her role as the childbearer of the race. This unfortunate assignment by nature, Shulamith argued, has determined woman’s entire history: from it all else flows. Her solution to the problem? An extremity of test tube babies. Let most if not all children be not only conceived but brought to term outside the female body. This alone will end women’s oppression.

The book landed like a bombshell, first in America, then very soon across much of the world. Aside from the analysis itself, what was revolutionary here was the ferocity with which Shulamith argued her case, admitting to all its emotional impediments but urging that we nonetheless rise above sentimentality. She called childbirth “barbaric” and viewed the nuclear family as a stifling influence on the full, free development of an individual’s inner life. In its depth, breadth, and severity, The Dialectic of Sex was both thrilling and dismaying. Before long, Shulamith Firestone was something of an international celebrity.

That was 1970. By then, she had already begun to withdraw from movement politics: she no longer wished to be a professional feminist. She retreated to her tenement apartment in the East Village and concentrated on drawing and painting (she had considerable talent as a visual artist). We will never know what her other future might have held, though, because something especially menacing was waiting in the wings—and very soon it came for her.

In the mid-1980s Shulamith was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. From then until her death, a good twenty-five years later, an unimaginable amount of mental misery was hers to endure. Life became an endless round of medication and madness: periods of lucidity alternating with periods of soul-destroying paranoia which led to repeated—and dreaded—incarcerations in mental hospitals. There were times when Shulamith starved because she was convinced her food was poisoned, times when she begged on the street because she thought she was penniless, times when she neither answered the door or the phone for weeks on end or, alternately, adopted elaborate disguises before she’d emerge from the hovel her apartment had come to resemble.

Throughout all this she was neither forgotten nor abandoned; a changing but ever-faithful band of friends, comrades, and relatives routinely intervened to save her from herself, making sure the rent was paid, there was food in the refrigerator, and she was taking her medication. However, a mental patient, like an alcoholic, is endlessly cunning when it comes to subverting salvation, and Shulamith Firestone was one of the best. Nothing could stop her from unraveling. One day in August 2012, when she was sixty-seven years old, she was found dead, face-down on the floor of her shabby, broken-down apartment. It was estimated that she’d been dead for either some days or some weeks.

The remarkable thing was that she had never stopped working. Throughout those terrible years of intermittent insanity, she wrote, she painted, she drew. When she died she left behind at least one complete novel, hundreds of poems and stories, many paintings and drawings. Most of it never got published or exhibited but there it was, a testament to a mind and spirit that refused to be extinguished before the body in which they were housed stopped functioning.

The problem, always, was the medication she was forced to take: on the one hand, it subdued her paranoia; on the other, it left her feeling like a zombie. Shulamith on meds was a quiet person without one interesting thought in her head; Shulamith off meds was brilliant and uncontrollable. Robert Roth, a friend throughout the years, has written about Shulamith and her Jekyll-Hyde relationship to her prescribed drugs: “I would know early on when she went off her medication. Weeks before the full effects would surface, very sharp, shimmering perceptions would flash out. . . . They were so vivid and poetic. Like a sudden burst of light breaking through thick, dense clouds. . . . That’s when we knew trouble was ahead.” 

Roth also writes of “the immense responsibility falling on friends and family. . . . To let her die. Be injured. Not let her die. Become her jailor.” To hospitalize her was to “betray her” by letting the institution “put a chemical lock on her emotions, her creativity.” Even worse, it was to condemn her to a terrible aloneness. “Without community it is all so horrible.”

In a 2024 issue of And Then, a magazine of contemporary writing which Roth helps edit, there appears a three-page poem of Shulamith’s. Written sometime in the 1980s or 90s, the poem—called “Vending in the Street”—delivers wonderfully on the flavor of Shulamith’s life when she was off medication but not yet hospitalized. The narrating perspective is that of someone who’s become financially derelict but the voice delivers a shocking evocation of what it means, existentially speaking, to find oneself in social freefall. Here’s a bit of it:

hitting bottom
there is no bottom

I thought I could sink no lower
than to sell
slush
in the streets of Manhattan
in august

But I was wrong!
[. . . ]
at bottom
there is no bottom

I thought I could sink no lower
than to pass out on the floor
at the health department
after waiting 3 days
in the 6 a.m. line
for a vendor’s license

but I was wrong!
[. . . ]
I thought I could sink no lower
then tussling with a crippled
black beggar
who had stolen my (illegal) panhandling
site
at the subway entrance
in front of may department stores

but I was wrong!
I could be busted
(handcuffs and all)
for returning to that site
after being warned by the cops
never to panhandle there again.

at bottom
there is no bottom

At bottom there is no bottom. This from the woman who wrote The Dialectic of Sex.

Sometime in the 1990s Shulamith was persuaded to pull together a number of the short pieces she had written that were strewn about the apartment, most of them an outgrowth of her repeated hospitalizations. A friend with a connection took the manuscript to the independent book publisher Semiotext(e), where it was immediately accepted and published in 1998 as a book of short stories.

Except “stories” seems not quite the right word for the collection, which reads far more like a group of journal entries. Most of the pieces are very short, not more than a page or so, and almost all feel like a fragment of thought abandoned before it could be shaped into a reading experience. Nonetheless, as a whole, the book is strangely powerful. I read it in a single sitting and then, feeling both gripped and dissatisfied, went through it again, this time tagging, here and there, a line I’d found striking. When I turned the last page I typed the lines out, one beneath the other, as in a laundry list, and read them again. Lo and behold, I found my heart pressing against my chest. A woman gifted with a significant intellect and an urgent need to right a historic wrong loses the ability to ground herself in everyday rationality—and writes a book that captures the situation so graphically it elevates her condition to the status of metaphor. The Dialectic of Sex is a polemic. Airless Spaces is literature.

The book is divided into a number of sections—Hospital, Post-Hospital, Losers, Obits, and Suicides I Have Known—the most important of these being the first two. The pieces here, as Chris Kraus explains in the new edition’s introduction, do not so much relate the history of Shulamith’s own mental illness as provide Shulamith with the opportunity to embed her reader in the penetrating experience of institutionalization. Almost every tale has a narrator with a different name and a different identity but somehow they are all Shulamith—and they all end with a human soul, already in torment, feeling ever more diminished as the episodes accumulate and the environment thickens. Ultimately, what Airless Spaces is recording is the gradual shriveling of the human spirit when subjected to the practices of a social system that cannot help but equate obedience with mental health.

And now we’re into it:

In one piece a terrified patient has refused to bathe for quite some time. When at last she is pushed under the shower, the experience is deadly. She is held down by four people (one for each limb), scrubbed mercilessly, her legs forced apart, her hair attacked not with shampoo but with some vile cleansing liquid, all of which leaves her feeling violated. Worse: “From this time on Corinne began to look like a mental patient, not an attractive woman who just happened to be thrown into a mental hospital.” This is one of a number of times in Airless Spaces when the reader is made to feel the sense of loss that comes with the slow, steady erasure of oneself as a sexual person—a routine experience in the hospital.

Then there is Bettina, who “[has] severe insomnia and the loveless hospital only made it worse.” Her entire body hurts and she often feels like she is about to jump out of her skin. When the endless wakefulness becomes unbearable, “that is right before the blood test teams came in and the morning shift changed, somewhere in the hour of the wolf,” Bettina, like the wounded animal that she is, “[takes] to circling around her bed and counting.” It is this circling and counting, which alone soothes her, that is held against Bettina when her evaluation hearings are held.

Next we have a woman who is released and yet not released from the hospital (as was Shulamith herself on a number of occasions). It seems she had left her apartment in an uninhabitable state and now, while it is being put to rights, the hospital insists on housing her in a room at the Y, where her sense of isolation becomes ever more acute: “She waited all week and a half for her one hour social work visit, her only contact with humanity,” and the reader wonders, why her only contact with humanity? There are residents and staff workers and visitors at the Y, but the patient spends her days and nights as though in solitary confinement. Why? The aloneness is morbid: she herself is aware of how odd is her own conviction that the human touch is permanently beyond her reach. But then again, her sense of life among others had, in fact, been coming apart from the moment the hospital doors had closed behind her. Now she is being told it’s not just because of the apartment that she cannot be fully released, it’s that she must enter a day program where she will be instructed to meet and mingle with new people. On the instant life has become a Catch-22. She has a horror of these programs. She is convinced that if she enters one she’ll be stigmatized as a permanent patient: she’ll never again get a job or if she gets one she won’t hold it. Of course, it isn’t a job she won’t be able to get or hold—but nothing can persuade her otherwise.

Another first-person narrator tells us that she’s “read of a Reichian treatment once which was deemed successful”—a seventy-nine-year-old woman receiving it began to recover from cancer—but, the narrator thinks to herself, she’s alone in the world, she’s got no one and nothing to go home to, so what good is the medical reprieve? The implication for the reader: that’s what’s waiting for each of us, when we get out of here. We are all homeless, permanently homeless, irremediably homeless, homeless within ourselves.

In the bluntly titled “Hating Hospitals,” Shulamith, through one of her surrogates, tells us that there are a number of ways a person can enter a psychiatric ward, chief among them either voluntarily or involuntarily. A self-styled free spirit, she has “always made a point of going in as involuntary—wheelchairs, police breaking in the door (sometimes up to ten men at once), EMS ambulances and police cars, handcuffs and injections, the whole bit.” She knows this style of resistance is ultimately self-defeating—her involuntary status will be held against her when she applies for release and moreover, “it was a sure ticket to second-class status inside the hospital itself”—but she feels obligated, “just for honor’s sake,” to register her refusal to cooperate with a system that protects itself at the expense of one’s innate dignity.

A founding myth tells us that after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge they evolved into beings endowed with consciousness, and from then on they were creatures apart, no longer at one with all the dumb animals with whom they had previously shared the Earth. The gifts of thought and emotion left the human race feeling both proud and lonely. The loneliness proved our undoing. It so perverted our instincts that we became strangers to ourselves—the true meaning of alienation—and thus creatures unable to feel kinship with others.

This ur-loneliness is at the heart of Airless Spaces. Mental illness is the metaphor of choice, but the author has something more encompassing on her mind. Drifting around as she does, in a world of women and men who, for one reason or a thousand, are enveloped in an almost biblical sense of internal isolation, she, in episode after episode, makes the reader feel the ravages of an affliction which, very nearly, seems inborn. Perhaps, having been burdened with a psyche divided against itself, humanity is destined to live homeless, addicted, incarcerated; in which case it is incumbent on the self-policers among us to show mercy.

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