| Shulamith Firestone. Photograph: Lori Hiris |
My hero:
Shulamith Firestone by Joanna Biggs
A 1960s activist who set up the first radical feminist groups in New York, her book The Dialectic of Sex is back in print for the first time in 45 years
Saturday 9 May 2015
A
t the 1967 National Conference for New Politics in Chicago, Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman submitted a resolution that would still be controversial today: they wanted marriage and property laws to be more equal, women to have control over their own bodies and to be represented to the strength of 51% on the conference floor. “Cool down, little girl,” the chairman said, and, as Freeman remembered, “literally patted Shulie on the head”. Firestone didn’t cool down: at 22, she would set up the first radical feminist groups in New York; at 24, she would organise the first abortion speak-out in America; at 25, she would write The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, now brought back into print by Verso after 45 years.