Cropped image from TheAtlanticWire.com.

I was sorry to hear Shulamith Firestone, author in 1968 1970 of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, passed away late last week.

Her book is, I think, harder to read today than it was when it came out now nearly half a century ago. The world has really changed since then. Medical science, academia, feminism, and even mainstream, non-complete-wingnut conservative chauvinism(!!) have changed since then. And I think to at least some extent her book was responsible for some of that change.

Some of the things she said, though, still resonate like a bell. While I wasn't as taken by her "futurist" passages I learned a lot when, too late in life, I finally read the darn book.  I liked it, and her, a lot.  She hugely influenced how I wrote thereafter.

Update: By the way, when I said things have changed since 1970 (I mistakenly said Firestone's book came out in 1968) I obviously didn't mean everything's changed. But, especially considering it came out years before Roe vs. Wade was handed down, society was really, really different then. For one thing, unlike us, she didn't have 40+ years of radical, moderate, and progressive feminism to lean on. Instead she had nada. (In fact one of Firestone's widely-noticed "radical feminist" pieces was an answer to the "father of abortion rights" Bill Baird, who had opined that maybe someday actual women would become angry enough about limits on reproductive rights to become activists in what he largely considered to be his movement.) So. Yeah. We're not living in utiopia here in the 21st Century. But the world was radically different then.