Mar

21

2025

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): In 2013, nine months after the death of the radical feminist luminary Shulamith Firestone, Susan Faludi published an impressive, heavily researched account of Firestone’s life in The New Yorker, laying out the personal and political dramas that separated the brilliant author of the Dialectic of Sex from the movement she helped found, and catalyzed her lonely spiral into poverty and madness. An explosive writer and organizer, Firestone was at the center of the New York City-based radical feminist movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s that tore itself apart almost as soon as it announced itself in earnest, and just as its ideas were gaining ground. Faludi’s article details this implosion in a vivid, claustrophobic catalog of leftist folly: call-out culture (they called it “trashing”) and impossible purity tests, factionalism, and a self-destructive penchant for tearing down its leaders. By 1970, the movement appeared gutted, with most of its prominent leadership tossed and groups splitting down to the atom. Several women suffered nervous breakdowns; some ended up homeless; several others committed suicide. Firestone was one of those destroyed leaders. “Basically, I don’t believe finally that the revolution is so imminent that it’s worth tampering with my whole psychological structure, submitting to mob rule, and so on, which is what they’re all into,” she wrote to her sister in 1970. A few years later, she had a full schizophrenic break.

This portrait of a movement driven crazy by movement work, leaving women who aspired to sisterhood in extreme isolation, is the backdrop to Airless Spaces, Firestone’s second and last book, published in 1998 after nearly a decade spent in and out of public psychiatric hospitals. (Semiotext(e) recently reissued it with an introduction by Chris Kraus and an afterword by Faludi, but I read an old copy and can’t speak to these new additions.) The jacket copy refers to the book’s collection of intimate, tragic vignettes as “short stories,” and I suppose they are, but they are more a collection of people, such as you might find in a terrible waiting room lit with buzzing fluorescent lights: exhausted, forgotten, barely hanging on. Sometimes they are Firestone—she is recognizable despite the various names she gives herself in third-person tellings, as well as in the “I.” Much of the time they are sharply observed portraits of others, people whose lives outside the institutions have come to make even less sense than they do inside. It’s a bleak read, to be sure—the last section is a collection of “Suicides I Have Known,” ending with that of her brother—but the writing is crisp, entertaining, and alive, a reminder that our guide to this gallery of life’s “losers” is none other than the great Shulamith Firestone.

There were a few strong attempts by intergenerational groups of feminists to build a community around Firestone in her later years, but ultimately they did not last, as the women moved away or themselves grew ill. She died alone in her apartment, face down on the floor. “Care” has become a kind of buzzword in movement spaces. But if the term has become cliched, its practice remains elusive. If there’s anything to glean from Firestone’s story—in movements and mental institutions that were more malady than cure—it’s that we cannot stop talking about care until we learn how to do it. Otherwise, our political communities will end in tatters; our ideals will come to nothing.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): Women’s consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and early ‘70s—apart from serving as the pilot light of second-wave feminism—had a significant theatrical life. Feminist theater companies that sprang up across the country half a century ago often staged the inherently dramatic process of CR participants discovering that the oppression they thought was theirs alone was in fact shared by others, that the problems they faced were not individual but structural. As these groups fizzled out over the years—casualties of internal conflicts over sexuality, race, and class; the institutionalization of feminism; and especially conservative backlash—pop culture began treating them as a joke. The movies Women in Revolt (1971), Annie Hall (1977), 10 (1979), and Private Benjamin (1980), for instance, as well as many early SNL sketches, mocked the insights women drew from CR groups.

In 1988, a moment marked by Reaganism’s triumphant ascent and glossy magazines that extolled the “new traditionalist” women who were fleeing unfulfilling jobs to find contentment in serving their husbands and children, Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Heidi Chronicles premiered to rave reviews and major prizes. A touching and troubling comedy, its passive protagonist essentially blames the women’s movement—and not, say, the failure of men to share equally in housework or the expense and scarcity of good childcare—for not having enabled well-educated, upper-middle-class white women like herself to enjoy both satisfying family lives and flourishing careers. Lauded as giving voice to the disappointment women were reluctant to air, the play’s portrayal of a CR group showed a hilariously touchy-feely encounter where women constantly hug and vacantly reassure each other.

Now, a generation later, the wonderfully shape-shifting playwright Bess Wohl has returned CR groups to the stage, but this time with genuine curiosity, complexity, self-reflection, and yes, humor. Her poignant new play, Liberation—running Off-Broadway until April 6th—depicts a group of six diverse women in CR meetings held in the gym of a rec center in Ohio in the ‘70s. Over the span of several years, we see them tentatively, then more forthrightly, take up issues like workplace discrimination, the overwhelming responsibilities of caregiving, and stifling marriages (“Now my kids are grown, and my husband is retired which means he’s home all day,” says one, by way of introduction. “I’m here because I need things to get me out of the house so I don’t stab him to death.”) In a moving, anti-titillating second-act opener, the women sit together naked, exploring what they like—but really, mostly hate—about their bodies. They bond, they fight, they reveal their hypocrisies, they become politicized.

But the play is not simply a chronicle of this process; it’s a deep and emotional, even desperate, inquiry by the daughter of the CR group’s initiator, looking back on the ‘70s from the present. As the framing narrator of what the play’s subtitle calls “A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember,” the daughter is an affable host, setting the scene and walking in and out of it, playing her own mother in the CR group sessions. As a writer both beleaguered by and adoring of her own children, she is looking belatedly for guidance from her recently deceased mother: “My devoted, dutiful mom who sewed the costumes for every school play and cooked every family dinner and did all the dishes and took me to every piano lesson and sat through it and never, ever missed a recital even though I was definitely not a musician—she was actually . . . a radical?” the daughter wonders aloud. In the strange space of theater, even one that’s fairly realistic in its depictions, she can do what a lot of us yearn to do: meet a deceased parent and ask what we never asked about their pre-parenthood life. In a beautiful, gut-wrenching scene toward the end, the daughter does exactly this—only to find that the search for a usable past is as failingly personal as it is political.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Jonathan Schell’s The Village of Ben Suc—recently reissued by NYRB Classics—originally appeared as a long article in the July 8th, 1967 issue of The New Yorker. Schell, then just 23 years old, was on the scene in January 1967 when the Vietnamese village of Ben Suc, a hotbed of activity by the freedom fighters of the National Liberation Front (known by Americans as the Viet Cong), was, as the phrase went at the time, “destroyed in order to save it.” It was a village that, like others in the triangle on the Saigon River, loyally paid its taxes to the NLF and housed many of its members. The Americans therefore decided to clear thousands of people from their homes and fields, parking them in a makeshift space that resembled nothing so much as a lightweight concentration camp, its inhabitants forbidden from passing its perimeter on pain of death. While Ben Suc was not, like My Lai, the site of a massacre, the American GIs innocents certainly killed civilians callously and carelessly. When it first appeared, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Schell’s text was a work of moral and political immediacy; today it remains essential reading as the patient examination of one of our great crimes as Americans.

Schell writes of the assault on Ben Suc in a measured tone and with a specificity that underlines both the cruelty and stupidity of the American effort in Vietnam. We learn, for instance, that only one member of the American forces in Ben Suc spoke Vietnamese, which obviously inhibited their ability to communicate with people who had been deprived of their homes, supposedly for their own good. And when the army provided their victims rice, it was not Vietnamese but poor-quality American rice; for the villagers, this was tantamount to being fed dog food. He portrays the American soldiers not as murderous goons, but as young men infected with a casual racism they felt no need to hide—and which he dutifully records in painstaking detail. Small wonder that the US and its local puppet allies lost the war for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese.

For me, as for many of those of my generation, a life on the left has been a life of defeat after defeat, and often of discovering that we supported the wrong causes, even if for the right reasons. But as The Village of Ben Suc affirms, strident opposition to the war in Vietnam—and advocacy for true justice, not just the mealy-mouthed “peace” so many restricted themselves to—was perhaps the most correct cause of my life. (For a comprehensive demonstration, I also recommend Geoffrey Wawro’s The Vietnam War, a thorough and frank military history that shows how the US could under no circumstances have won the war, while unflinchingly documenting the innumerable crimes committed in our name.) Reading Schell’s text now renewed my disgust for the ubiquitous sentimentality and lachrymose verbiage about our veterans; I, for one, will never thank anyone who took part in that calamity for their service.