In 1967, a group of graduate-student documentarians followed Shulamith Firestone, then a 22-year-old art student and postal worker, to a critique of her paintings at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Can you explain these compositions a little more?” one of the members of the all-male panel asked her, referring to Firestone’s painting of 10 nearly identical men slumped over worktables and surrounded by a bleak, purple-black darkness harshly lit by bare industrial spotlighting. “They’re just a little on the dreary side…”

“I like the solitary quality,” Firestone said of her painting. Her work, she explained, is about “a certain dehumanization and alienation that most people have to go through in their daily work.”

Three decades later, Firestone was clearly still committed to this aesthetic goal, as she devoted her only work of fiction, Airless Spaces, to documenting the lives of thwarted, marginal, and isolated people. The book, which was first published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, is a tender, compassionate, and crushingly depressing work of fiction by one of our most important feminist theorists.

Shulamith Firestone is best known as the author of the 1970 treatise The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published three years after she graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While a student, Firestone was involved in left-wing politics and grew increasingly fed up with the exclusion of women and the outright misogyny of those spaces. At the 1967 National Conference for New Politics in Chicago, intended to unite civil rights and anti-war activists, Firestone and a group of women proposed a resolution on women’s equality but were completely ignored by the male organizers. The women involved in the conference started a group called Westside, named for the West Side of Chicago, where they met and discussed feminism and organizing. At another left-wing conference, this time in 1969, they brought a resolution forward and were yelled off the stage by men shouting, “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” Firestone, no doubt spurred to action through rage—her sister had already documented the yelling matches between Shulie and her tyrannical and misogynistic Orthodox Jewish father—turned to organizing and writing. Along with three other women, she founded the group New York Radical Women and a periodical, Notes, that published feminist writings and theory, including Carol Hanisch’s landmark essay “The Personal Is Political.”

Firestone visited Paris and dropped off a copy of Notes at the apartment of her hero, Simone de Beauvoir, to show her what the American feminists were up to. But de Beauvoir wasn’t at home, and Firestone was apparently chased away by a rude concierge. So Firestone, who had been called “the American Simone de Beauvoir” by some of her comrades, set out to write a book as intellectually rigorous and powerful as de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone hoped to provide an “analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism.” She argued that the “biological division of the sexes” was a deeper problem than class struggle, as gender discrimination is “an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.” Using “the best of Marx and Engels (the idea of historical materialism) with the best of Freud (the understanding of the inner man and woman and what shapes them)” and a genealogy of previous feminist movements, Firestone posited a new revolutionary feminism whose end goal “must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”

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Firestone’s only other book, Airless Spaces, which she wrote in her late 40s, was not so concerned with this utopian vision of gender equality but instead dramatized what happens when capitalist alienation makes everybody miserable. The men and women of this book are equally subject to lives of abjection and despair, and to Firestone’s thoughtful consideration of their circumstances. Organized into five sections—“Hospital,” “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits,” and “Suicides I Have Known”—Airless Spaces is an encyclopedia of suffering, set over 50 or so very short stories.

In “Orgonomy,” a “seventy-nine-year-old widow” recovers from cancer only to think, “What should she do then? There was no one, nothing in her life for her to reach out toward.” In “Leon Feldsher,” the titular character, a lonely 59-year-old man on disability benefits for mental illness, desperate for a bit of intimacy, timidly asks his home health aide for a hug. In “Prevoc,” a man named Brian needs to find a paying job to cover a rent hike, but starts preparing for his eviction and living on the streets when he can only get volunteer work for “mental patients” walking shelter dogs: “He felt sorry for all cooped up as he himself had been in the hospital.” In “The Visit,” a woman goes to see a friend who is losing her hearing and, because her friend doesn’t hear the doorbell at first, imagines how difficult it will be for others to visit her and how isolated her friend may become. In each story,  we see intelligent, compassionate, and thwarted people desperate to connect. 

How did the firebrand who wrote The Dialectic of Sex—an ambitious work with not only a vision of change for the world but the forceful belief that it was possible to bring it about—write just one more book, one that contained no victories but only a consciousness of futility and loss?

Upon Dialectic’s publication, Firestone—who had already founded the organizations New York Radical Feminists and Redstockings—became a public figure, giving speeches and appearing on both television and radio. But as soon as she became an intellectual celebrity, Firestone was made a marginal figure within the Stanton-Anthony Brigade, a New York Radical Feminists cell that she led. As Chris Kraus, the publisher of Airless Spaces, explains in her new introduction to the book, “Leadership and all forms of distinction came to be deeply resented. Those who asserted themselves as speakers were publicly criticized and denounced.”

The second-wave feminist Carol Giardina told Susan Faludi, in the latter’s New Yorker article on Firestone (reprinted as the afterword in Airless Spaces), “I don’t know anyone who founded a group and did early organizing who wasn’t thrown out.” Firestone was called “unsisterly” because she refused to share in housekeeping responsibilities in the meeting space, insisting: “I’m an intellectual, I don’t sweep floors.” Most of the group’s leaders would be kicked out by usurpers who installed themselves in their place with the professed belief of adhering to a more egalitarian politics, which inevitably led to more of the same in-fighting. This development is covered in Airless Spaces in Firestone’s “obituary” of her friend Myrna Glickman, who “was always timid and had a follower’s role in the supposedly leaderless group”—which, after the “coup” that ousted Firestone, “dwindled from five hundred members down to seven.”

In the aftermath of this break, Firestone spent the rest of the early ’70s trying her hand at new projects like an unsuccessful “female Whole Earth Catalogue,” after which she mostly hid out, first in disguises and odd hairdos in the East Village and later, after she’d absconded there, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she worked as a typist at MIT. “She was totally devastated…. It was like she’d been rejected by her family,” her feminist contemporary Anselma Dell’Olio told Faludi. But this wasn’t Firestone’s first experience of rejection and exile: She grew up as an Orthodox Jew in St. Louis having fierce arguments with her father, who according to Faludi called The Dialectic of Sex “the joke book of the century.”

The most personal that Firestone gets in Airless Spaces is in the story “Danny,” about her older brother, filed under “Suicides I Have Known.” The two had been incredibly close growing up—“the first word out of my mouth was ‘Danny,’” she recalls, “presumably in a yell of glee”—until suddenly he wanted nothing to do with her or anybody else and even started “torturing some little stray kittens” that Firestone had rescued. She followed him to a yeshiva boarding school and then to college at Washington University, where he beat her when she didn’t observe the Sabbath. Firestone broke off contact with her brother, and Danny, like his little sister, eventually renounced his religion. But it was Zen Buddhism rather than feminism that he threw himself into, joining a monastery and giving up his worldly possessions.

“I remember finding it amazing,” Firestone writes, “how similar our paths had been, even with no contact for over a decade.” When she learned that Danny had died, she was distraught: There would be no opportunity for the two to reconcile. She attended his funeral back in the Midwest, with full Jewish burial rites, only to discover that their parents had suppressed the fact that her brother had died by suicide in order to afford him the burial he would otherwise be denied under Jewish law. “I spent some years trying to find Danny in the spiritual realm,” Firestone continues, “but I was told by more than one medium that his violent death had shattered his ethereal body so he couldn’t be reached.” Perhaps it was because she saw herself so clearly in her brother that, after Danny’s suicide in the mid-1970s, Firestone’s own schizophrenia surfaced. “In the end,” she writes, “theories about his death, whether murder or suicide, afterlife or no, contributed to my own growing madness—which led to my hospitalization, medication and a shattering nervous breakdown.” But it wasn’t until 1987, after her father had died and, as her sister Tirzah noted, Firestone had “lost that ballast he somehow provided,” that hospitalization was necessary.

One cannot blame Firestone’s disappearance from public life, and the isolation she subjected herself to, on any one circumstance, whether it’s the people who kicked her out of the movement, the family who more or less disowned her, the doctors who failed to help her, or her lifelong struggle with poverty and mental health. The entire world was the problem. As Kate Millett, the feminist artist and theorist and a contemporary of Firestone’s, wrote in a 1998 essay: “Our fragile cohort, unable to be effective against the real circumstances of our discouragement, were also too timid to address them and could only stand by and murmur the formulae of ‘mental health’ as if it were an individual’s personal ‘problem’ with the world.”

It wasn’t just Firestone. By the new millennium, Millett too was left eking out a living selling Christmas trees in the cold in Poughkeepsie, New York, cutting down the firs she’d planted at her feminist art colony.

By this point, Firestone thought little of her legacy, of her influence on feminism and the world. Her “obituary” in Airless Spaces for “Jeremy Salzburg”—a thinly veiled Allen Ginsberg, who “shed a light she almost took for granted, [and] opened a little circle in which she could breathe”—charts her resentments, small hopes, and disappointments with her position in just six pages. When Salzburg invites her to a party, she is thrilled—“How did he know that this was precisely what [she] needed most?”—but she shows up a day late, to a darkened apartment. Firestone admits just how desperate she was to be recognized by this poet she respected, and when she is, she refuses to believe that she could be of interest to him and concludes instead that she’d “made a mistake in trying to act normal: it had been precisely her hospital experience that interested him.”

In the early 1990s, a group of young feminists—among them a nurse, a filmmaker, and a new-media artist, all of whom had read and been inspired by The Dialectic of Sex in their youth—started caring for an ailing Firestone. “The support group is really proving its worth,” she wrote, “I may be redeemed again.” They took her on motorcycle rides and to listen to music, helped her adopt a kitten (Pussy Firestone), and encouraged her to write again. Airless Spaces, which Firestone dedicated to her psychiatric case worker, Lourdes Cintron (one of the group’s members), was the result. They helped publish the book and organized a well-attended celebration, but by the mid-’90s the support group had dissipated, as its members moved away or fell ill themselves, and Firestone returned to the psych ward.

Firestone dedicated The Dialectic of Sex to “Simone de Beauvoir, who endured.” Though she was critical of de Beauvoir, Firestone wrote that she was the “only one who came close” to a materialist feminist analysis. Like de Beauvoir, Firestone was not just a theorist; she was an artist first. The Dialectic of Sex and The Second Sex both deliver their arguments in lovely prose that is far more engaging and less didactic than a standard political tract. Airless Spaces is similarly stylish, but in place of fierce argument, Firestone allows the minutiae of her characters’ lives to illustrate her positions. 

In the story “Radio Station WISS,” Pauline, a paranoid 82-year-old pianist, visits the office of a Jewish doctor “with a large drawing of Freud on the wall.” He tells her to listen to music, because “old King Saul, the first king of the Jews, had been a paranoid who had first employed the shepherd David as a harpist to relieve his symptoms.” “Where did he get that,” Pauline wonders, “from Moses and Monotheism?” Even so, she does try to listen to classical music on the radio, but her condition is only made worse, as she is tormented by the “advertising aimed at the middle class, consumers of Lincoln Center extravaganzas and Broadway musicals and fancy French midday restaurants and air travel and most of all medical and financial advice.” The story then ends abruptly with Pauline right where she began, with just “the drip-drip of the kitchen faucet to listen to.” Firestone draws fully formed characters and pays careful attention to scene-setting—balancing plot and characterization skillfully—only to promptly abandon them as soon as the story comes into focus, and her characters never find resolution. In that way, she traps her characters in a paralysis similar to her own.

Firestone was aware of the power that fictional characters have in shaping what we remember, as well as the power that history has in shaping the present. In The Dialectic of Sex’s first chapter, a history of American feminism, she writes:

A hundred years of brilliant personalities and important events have…been erased from American history. The women orators who fought off mobs, in the days when women were not allowed to speak in public, to attack Family, Church and State, who travelled on poor railways to cow towns of the West to talk to small groups of socially starved women, were quite a bit more dramatic than the Scarlett O’Haras and Harriet Beecher Stowes and all the Little Women who have come down to us.

I can’t help but feel angry that Firestone—whose vignettes in Airless Spaces about the victims of our nation’s pathetic welfare state and inhumane mental health services are, even in their brevity, at times as brilliant as Dostoyevsky and as damning as Nellie Bly—wasn’t well enough supported to take her immense talent and write the kind of fiction about women trying to live their new political realities that de Beauvoir was able to. Although the real tragedy is that the feminist revolution Firestone imagined is no closer to taking place now than it was in her era, what I wouldn’t give to read a doorstopper of a political-feminist epic, in the vein of The Golden Notebook or The Mandarins and by a writer as perceptive as Firestone, about a woman trying to live her revolutionary feminist principles as the second wave fizzled out and the political ferment and artistic experimentation of the early ’70s gave way to the narrowed horizons of neoliberal post-bankruptcy New York.

In February, I went to a talk by the feminist writer Sophie Lewis, who said that when she asked her college students what they knew about second-wave feminism, it was only its “gender-critical” TERFs, such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, that they’d heard of. One wonders what that movement would have been like if Firestone, whose primary concern was with engendering a world in which “genital differences between human beings would no longer matter,” hadn’t been jettisoned and had been able to maintain the movement’s Marxist underpinnings. As Firestone told the documentary crew following her around as a 22-year-old, “In an artwork, you can do anything. You can make the world exactly the way you want it…. Instead of beauty and power occasionally, I want to achieve a world where it’s there all the time, in every word and every brushstroke, and not just now and then.”