I wanted to like Shulamith Firestone when I first met her. Why wouldn't you want to be
friends with someone named Shulamith Firestone? As a young woman who grew up listening to
Free to Be You and Me and who was trying to understand how and why women's experience mattered, I wanted to meet this radical feminist.
But I learned, when I read her work and read about her, that Firestone was a hard person to like. I struggled with her ideas-was she really saying that all men were oppressors?
That motherhood was slavery? But what I really struggled with was that she seemed like all the mean, unbending, feisty people who never seemed to capitulate, just a little bit, to other peoples' feelings. She sounded like someone I would never be friends with, because she would always call me out for watching the wrong thing on TV, laughing at the wrong jokes, for not being angry all the time because the world was just so messed up and patriarchal.
I have a hard time dealing with anger, and sometimes I misread conviction as anger. I took Firestone's anger personally, because I thought I was a feminist and Firestone told me I was not. I was thinking about skinny models in magazine ads and sexist language, but she was questioning the very structure of our society: the vast, terrifying network of injustice that values some people over others and, scariest of all, makes most of it invisible to most of us most of the time. *Lalalalalalala!* I sang, writing to
Vogue magazine about their use of rail-thin model Kate Moss in their photo spread, writing an editorial about the objectionable new men's magazine
Maxim, and trying to love my body fat.
I hadn't read (or fully understood) Marx or deBeauvoir (or Fuller or Douglass or Wolff), and I was clipping away at fuzzy little sprigs with my hedge-trimmers while she was hacking down the tree, grimacing and sweating and cursing. Her hacking lacked the precision of my hedge-trimming: you lose a lot when you go for the roots, and on many counts
she may have been wrong. But you could see through the opening she made.
I worry a lot about making the wrong move, and I like to be liked. Firestone may have cared about being liked--she certainly formed close, nurturing, and productive relationships with other women, even after she retreated from feminist organizing--but she didn't care about being liked more than she cared about structural inequality. Being nice
can work well, and it works for me most of the time, but it can also turn you into a doormat when you most need to be holding a battering ram. Firestone may have ended up a recluse, but she wasn't a doormat.
I am often a doormat, and she reminds me of how often all of us are so willing to shut up and put up that we don't even try. I had a mentor in grad school who was mean enough to tell me - with a rigid smile and her eastern accent that was surely a lot like Firestone's -that I was going to have to stop being so Midwest nice if I was going to succeed in academics. Being nice is part of my very being (as is, I suppose, my midwestern-ness), and her comment cut me, because it was hard to hear, and because it was true.
It is so hard for me, even now, to challenge
real injustice, and Firestone doesn't make it seem easy. But I wonder what I would be like if I were not this way, and what more I might have accomplished. I would still rather swallow
Carol Channing's honey-sweet tirade against housework than Firestone's bitter roots. But I owe Shulamith Firestone this much: if being liked means accepting a position that is stifling to me and that potentially stifles others, I ought to be willing to risk it
, at least for the time it takes me to saw off the branch in the way.
