There is by now a vibrant and contentious literature on the relationship between political change and mental illness. Does despair breed compliance, or can you fight back harder the less you have to lose? Could a shared cause of psychological suffering become a cause, rallying and even sustaining the sufferers? Must a mind unhinge itself from the social and economic order it inhabits to fully analyze, let alone try to interrupt, the mechanism? When attempting to lead a revolutionary movement, does it help to be a little crazy? Will the attempt drive you that way? How can we calculate the psychological toll of political defeat? Can the long-term, repetitive, one-step-forward-three-back efforts required for political organizing or for psychological well-being ever feel sufficient to the urgent crises they address? Will emotional healing inevitably tend toward adjustment to an unjust status quo, or can it serve revolt? Is solidarity the best cure for individual misery, or should safeguarding one’s own mental health be recognized as a prerequisite for collective action?
If some false binaries lurk here, they are those that inevitably waylay readers of the late radical feminist pioneer Shulamith Firestone, who in her early twenties cofounded several key second-wave groups and publications with the likes of Carol Hanisch (“the personal is political”), Robin Morgan (editor of Sisterhood is Powerful), and the formidable Ellen Willis. Having helped theorize the women’s liberation movement and make it impossible to ignore, Firestone was thrown out by her cohort and eventually spent decades mired in illness, poverty, and neglect. She remains best known for the first of only two published books, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, her incandescent, fundamentally flawed (essentialist, racist), and still evocative 1970 manifesto. Twenty-eight years of silence followed; what was to have been the next project, a sprawling work on women’s art, never appeared. Her second book, Airless Spaces, from 1998, is a set of autobiographical yet insistently alienated vignettes that draw on her repeated hospitalizations for psychosis from 1987 onward: she observes herself, the staff and inmates of the wards, and other “Losers” and “Suicides I Have Known.” Firestone’s books and fate seem to continually invite and resist the inadequate questions with which I began.
These questions are palpable in Susan Faludi’s account of Firestone’s two postmortem services in her quite beautiful 2013 New Yorker article, which serves as the afterword in Semiotext(e)’s rerelease of Airless Spaces. At a memorial service at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Firestone’s second-wave comrade Kate Millett explicitly linked her personal tragedy to a political, collective one. After reading from “Emotional Paralysis,” a piece from Airless Spaces about a woman who leaves a mental institution reduced to wreckage with “no salvage plan,” unable to read, write, act, decide, feel elation or desire, Millett said, “I think we should remember Shulie, because we are in the same place now.” Faludi reports that at the smaller Orthodox Jewish family funeral (to which the feminists were not invited), Firestone’s sister Tirzah found in her political legacy an image of redemption and renewal: “She had children—she influenced thousands of women to have new thoughts, to lead new lives. I am who I am, and a lot of women are who they are, because of Shulie.”
Thousands of feminist offspring, an image affecting in its many painful ironies. Tirzah was pushing back, at the funeral, on their brother Ezra’s sexist characterization of Firestone’s life as tragic because it lacked the steadying consolations of the nuclear family—the love of a husband and children. It seems clear that Firestone’s experience in their family of origin forged both her to-the-death spirit and the specific critique she developed in The Dialectic of Sex. (Along with her mother and five siblings, Firestone was under the thumb of a domineering, zealous father who, during a physical struggle in Firestone’s teens, threatened to kill her, to which she replied, “I’ll kill you first!”) Surely the most literally radical of radical feminist texts—taking on Marx, Engels, and Freud along the way—Dialectic locates the roots of all oppression, of all the ills of human nature, culture, and society (from racism to capitalist exploitation to the death drive to child abuse), in sexual difference and the fundamental oppression of women and children within the biological family. Whereas the nuclear family has often been accused of enabling larger forms of exploitation by softening or sweetening them with the unremunerated labors of love and care, Firestone insisted that it was rotten at the core. The family was the very place where injustice begins and is reproduced, forever, until revolution.
Firestone’s strengths and weaknesses as a political thinker are strikingly linked. Without this totalizing insistence on her own vantage point, through which she claimed to reconfigure world history, Dialectic would not have its existential fury, its still-provocative grandeur and ambition, or its prescience in emphasizing children’s liberation (as Simone de Beauvoir noted not long after its publication) and the urgent need to harness technology for progressive ends. Nor its painful failures to learn from the Black intellectual and political traditions around Firestone. My copy of Dialectic, an edition from 2003, begins with a statement that could be read as a disclaimer, an indictment of the contemporary state of things, or a defiant self-portrait: “The author would like to note that this book remains unabridged and unrevised since its original publication in 1970.”
She arguably took some of the wrong lessons from the defeat of the earlier women’s movement. As she wrote in a 1968 article in the journal Notes from the First Year, which she edited, the so-called first wave’s crusading potential was co-opted and diluted as “the monster of the vote . . . swallowed everything else.” As she saw it there had been too much compromise of every kind, and next time, she wrote, they must avoid ceding ground to supposedly “more important issues” and must “put our own interests first,” before making other alliances. It was an understandable conclusion, particularly in the context of a new movement splitting off perforce from leftist struggles in which Firestone and other women were repeatedly sidelined, used, and publicly humiliated. Still, solidarity proved notoriously hard to maintain across broad class and racial lines and even within Firestone’s smaller radical feminist vanguard. While some of these intractable difficulties are an inevitable part of political organizing—as of any human endeavor—and others apparently reflected regrettable tendencies among her comrades (like the tendency to suspect or resent ambition and other leadership qualities as “masculine”), Firestone’s unbending commitment to her own singularity, her reported unwillingness to do her share of typing, collating, cleaning floors, the movement equivalent of housework that many someones always have to do, was an obstacle as well. Political action requires not only energy and vision but the gift for accepting and learning to work around your own weaknesses and those of others. Too much to expect all this in every individual, and it’s maybe not surprising that some of those with a surfeit of the former qualities struggle more with the latter.
There is an understandable temptation to read Airless Spaces as a symptomatic depiction of genius brought low, of Firestone’s exhaustion and retreat, and with it that of a whole generation, a whole society. The utopian ferment and action of the ’60s and ’70s, when it seemed possible to transform the world together, had given way to the rapacity and despairing individualism of the post-Reagan era. On the surface, Airless Spaces does seem a painful descent from The Dialectic of Sex: bleakness where there was buoyancy, stasis and recursion where there was urgency and thrust, and loneliness where there was collective work. Self-loathing has replaced overweening confidence and in place of an all-encompassing scheme, fragmentation.
Yet Airless Spaces is a remarkable book, the work of an artist who had continued to analyze and critique the conditions in which she was surviving, to observe in and around them larger struggles and injustices. This time, she came to interrogate herself as well. She found a way to record and politicize the fracturing of her own mind and life. The book shares with Dialectic a bold, absurdist sensibility, and an extremity, a willingness to push a subject—and a reader—further than she may ever have wanted to go. It is unlike most memoirs of mental illness, refusing to dignify or shape or wring meaning from suffering. Written in disciplined parables that build their own formal logic within a tiny space, and that emphasize, both thematically and formally, disconnection and repetition, the book recounts the long-drawn-out undoing of its various “losers,” including many seeming alter egos and fellow-travelers, whether within the walls of institutions or on the outside. They suffer the same things together, frequently exacerbate their own suffering in similar ways, each alone. They endure the hospital routines, the pacing to pass time, the wars for the thermostat, the “brutal merriment” of cops called in to hold them down, the “loveless insomnia,” “the glaring lights-on orderlies with their trays, hunting through the rows of comatose bodies” every morning to take blood, all the ludicrous “activities” one must comply with to gain release.
Firestone constructs a precise kind of tragicomedy in which humiliation, loss, and destruction feel inevitable—and yet are always capable of fresh insult and surprise. Readers encounter the expected disappointment, then some new kind, then more of the old from another quarter, then the recognition that a character’s paltry effort to free or protect herself has boomeranged. The relief of numbness or resignation never arrives. There is tragedy without the sense of individual distinction, comedy without the communal reconciliation. Our dignity and sanity, inextricably connected, rely on small, banal gifts—not least connection to others, which psychosis and institutional life mercilessly attack. You adapt to your appalling circumstances and the adaptation dooms you. Compliance and assertiveness kill in equal measure. “She always made a point of going in as involuntary. . . just for honor’s sake.”
One narrator shares crucial institutional knowledge with a handsome male new fellow inmate but can’t bring herself to ask a small essential favor in return when he benefits from her advice and makes it out before her. Meanwhile she watches him at night, “large and heavy, a husband figure. I could just imagine waking up to that sleeping bulk day after day.” One of many trompe l’oeil images of escape that contain captivity. Another woman wakes up at home “one spring morning filled with light and peace” and life force. She writes a letter to an old friend she hopes to visit, a painter in rural Maine. On the next page the impulse ends with the realization she will never see this friend again, or know where he ended up. In an earlier “fit of madness” that in some way resembles that morning burst of optimism, she has inadvertently cut off this source of air and hope: “I had thrown out not just my pills but my papers and even my Rolodex files and address books in an effort to make a clean start.”
The book’s least successful pieces are those that allow Firestone’s earlier activities into view, featuring recognizable public figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Valerie Solanas, and Diane Arbus. Here the discipline that illuminates the portrayal of hospital and post-hospital life grows slack. A notable exception, in the last section, “Suicides I Have Known,” is a portrait of her eldest brother Danny, in which she considers the connections between their fates, whether his death caused her disintegration and vice versa, whether “it had been my own political limelight”—a rare mention—“that had brought the heat down on him as a warning to me.”
Airless Spaces begins with two wry, cunningly structured pieces, each less than a page. The first is narrated by someone who dreams she is seeking refuge in the basement of a sinking cruise liner. As the other passengers manically party and gorge themselves above deck, she entombs herself in an old refrigerator, to keep breathing in its bubble till the vessel is found (the piece suggests it never will be). Firestone sets up a spiraling, irreducible ambiguity as to what is a rebellious gesture or a suicidal one, a move to reach out to others and a viable future or a permanent cutting off. In the next story, told in the third person, a depleted woman emerges from a mental hospital yearning, after her long stretch shakily wrestling plastic wrappers at every meal, for fresh produce and silverware, “especially knives.” On her first night of freedom, an attempt to unwrap a cauliflower results in the accidental castration of her pinkie finger; found incompetent to feed herself, she is enrolled in meals-on-wheels. The logic of the hospital, its surveillance, repetition, fake food, and relentless succession of plastics, invades her home as well. In trying to choose life, eros, healthy aggression and appetite, the character finds herself not merely flung back into confinement—instead the institution itself is what bursts its bounds, making it out into the world, and back inside her.
At one point in Hannah Proctor’s 2024 book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat—which seeks an approach to struggle that makes room for the intense and ongoing toll it takes—she notes the airless, all-or-nothing perfectionism of Dialectic and movingly makes the case that one might reread it and Airless Spaces with and against one another to create some generative “friction,” opening “a space of ambivalence and strained solidarity among the disappointed,” in which the “seemingly incommensurable scales of the political and the depressive” can be brought closer together.
Both books are arresting, thought-provoking, flawed, valuable, cannily made objects that preserve a sensitive and turbulent mind’s response to crazy-making circumstance. Both appear to expand and collapse time (the claustrophobic exclusion of world events from Airless Spaces is in productive tension with its precise observation of Firestone’s physical and social surroundings—public services, technologies—which date the action even as its universal, endlessly recurring elements are emphasized). And both have qualities allowing them to live and snag and warp and morph in a reader’s mind, to be argued with and mocked and made use of across days and years.
In that, they have something in common with the kind of street-theater protest Firestone and her comrades were so adept at: the invasion of Albany’s legislative hearings on abortion; the burial for traditional “weeping womanhood” at Arlington National Cemetery; the 1969 Counter-Inaugural Coalition March in D.C. (WOMEN: LET’S GIVE THEM BACK THEIR VOTE); the notorious Atlantic City demonstration against the 1968 Miss America pageant, inaccurately immortalized in the term “bra-burning.” The effectiveness of such actions—including the risk of misinterpretation and backlash and co-optation—can be endlessly debated, but protest nonetheless can in mere moments alter consciousness, expand the field of possibility, show you how many thousand others share a sense of what is wrong, how many of those are already working and risking to fight what is elsewhere treated as unalterable.
Airless Spaces may be paradoxically the more ambitious of Firestone’s two books—in that it seems, formally and otherwise, to admit and probe its own limitations. And despite its merciless emphasis on despair and loneliness, Firestone notably chose to dedicate it to Lourdes Cintron. She was, we learn from Faludi, a caseworker at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York who successfully lobbied her employers to take Firestone on despite her lack of health insurance, and she became the lynchpin of a shifting group of women that for years met weekly to offer Firestone practical care, intellectual fellowship, solidarity. Without the support and encouragement of those women, she could not have written Airless Spaces—indeed, once the group disbanded, she began to fall apart again and did not recover. The women considered themselves Firestone’s family in the sense her sister Tirzah meant, not least Cintron, who years before had taken courage from The Dialectic of Sex in her activism for Puerto Rican independence. We know, of course, that political change is never made in isolation. We too easily forget the same is true of most writing that lasts.
Lidija Haas is a writer, editor, and candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City.