The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

Cover of the first edition, showing a portrait of an anonymous young woman by Edgar Degas
Author	Shulamith Firestone
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Radical feminism
Published	1970 (William Morrow and Company)
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	216
ISBN

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution is a 1970 book by Shulamith Firestone. It has been called the clearest and boldest presentation of radical feminism, but has also been criticized on numerous grounds.

Firestone's theories have been described by philosophy professor Mary Anne Warren as follows: Firestone argues that the biological sexual dichotomy, particularly the biological division of labor in reproduction, is the root cause of male domination, economic class exploitation, racism, imperialism and ecological irresponsibility. Sexual inequality is "an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself": in this sense, it has been universal and inevitable, but the cultural and technological preconditions now exist that make its elimination possible and perhaps necessary for human survival.

Firestone describes her approach as a dialectical materialism more radical than that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. She believes that in their preoccupation with economic processes, Marx and Engels failed to perceive "the sexual substratum of the historical dialectic." Unlike Engels, she maintains that male domination is biologically based and as such existed long before the institution of private property and the monogamous patriarchal family which private property produced. Male domination is the result of the "biological family", whether matrilineal or patrilineal, and the inevitable dependence of women and children within the family upon men, for protection if not subsistence. There were no ancient matriarchies (societies ruled by women), and the apparently superior status of women in matrilineal cultures is due only to the relative weakness of men. Whatever the lineage system, women's vulnerability during pregnancy and the long period of human infancy necessitate the protective and hence dominant role of the male.

This dependence of the female and the child on the male causes "psychosexual distortions in the human personality", distortions that were described by Sigmund Freud. Firestone describes Freudianism as a "misguided feminism", since she sees the only real difference between Freud's analysis and that of the radical feminists as being that Freud and his followers accept the social context in which sexual repression develops as immutable. Freud demonstrated that the source of repression and sex-class distinctions is the inherently unequal power relationship in the biological family: women and children are alike oppressed by the more powerful father. The young boy identifies first with the mother, whose oppression he shares, but soon switches his identification to the father, whose power he fears but will someday inherit. In the process he accedes to the incest taboo and the strict separation of sexuality and emotion which this requires, and which is the psychological foundation of political and ideological oppression. While the young girl also envies the father's power, she learns that she cannot inherit it and can only share in it indirectly, by currying favor with the dominant male.