At one point in “Airless Spaces,” a largely autobiographical book about madness and institutionalization by the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, the author recounts a scene where she runs into an old teacher in the East Village. Once, Firestone had been one of the man’s star pupils; an esteemed writer, he had encouraged her work. She may be happy to see him at first, but she soon realizes that he can tell from her dingy clothes that she is unwell. “We barely spoke,” she writes of the encounter, “but the recognition was certain. He took in my whole situation at a glance.”
Her situation was dire. By the time she wrote “Airless Spaces”—originally published in 1998 and reissued in February by Semiotext(e)—Firestone had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years, in multiple involuntary commitments, and had only a tenuous grip on reality. Before her first hospitalization, in 1987, she received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia; her longtime psychiatrist, Margaret Fraser, would describe her as having Capgras syndrome, a condition that made Firestone believe that people were hiding behind “masks of their own faces.”
Firestone had been, for a period, at the center of New York’s feminist intellectual life. By the time she walked down that street in the East Village, though, the potential her professor had once seen in her was long gone. She had for the most part stopped writing and producing visual art; she lived in isolation, delusion, and unrelenting poverty.
Her mental health would steadily decline, with only rare and partial episodes of remission. As Firestone’s illness progressed through the late nineteen-eighties and nineties, she became increasingly erratic, and eventually incapable of basic tasks. Her sister Laya recalled an episode in which she was summoned to New York by Shulie’s landlord: Firestone had been screaming in the night, and leaving her taps running, rotting the floorboards. When Laya arrived, she found her sister gaunt and panhandling. Firestone never regained permanent stability. Her body was found in her East Tenth Street apartment, in 2012; her landlord guessed that she had been dead for about a week. Because there was no food in her home, some speculated that Firestone had starved to death.
Firestone’s transformation from an activist who had bravely and lucidly critiqued her world into a suffering madwoman who could not understand it or function in it has haunted the second wave. At a memorial, the feminist writer Kate Millett, herself a veteran of psychiatric institutionalization, proposed that Firestone’s decline mirrored the movement’s, reading a passage from “Airless Spaces” in which Firestone writes that “her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.” “I think we should remember Shulie,” Millett said then. “Because we are in the same place now.”
Feminists have long understood themselves as truthtellers, as exposers of misogyny’s lie, and as champions of a vision of women’s equality and dignity that rests more in the reality of their capacities than on the myth of their proper role. But Firestone’s fate seemed to raise the grim possibility that this vision could drive women insane. “Many women give up in despair,” Firestone once wrote of the feminist movement. “If that’s how deep it goes they don’t want to know.” If sexism is predicated on a lie, as Firestone and her comrades claim, what does it cost women to know the truth?
Firestone had been one of the most outspoken and audacious leaders of the radical-feminist movement, the small but influential group of women who spun off from the male-dominated New Left in the late nineteen-sixties to propose a fundamental transformation of political and private life on the basis of gender equality. Both an organizer and an intellectual, she wrote some of the movement’s foundational tracts—including contributions to Notes, the annual periodical of the New York Radical Women that she founded, like the widely read 1968 essay “The Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.: A New View.” She also founded radical-feminist organizing groups, first in Chicago and then in New York, and led protests in a theatrical, irreverent Yippie style. The feminist Susan Faludi noted in an obituary that Firestone’s peers called her “the firebrand,” and sometimes “the fireball.” Even by the standards of the late-sixties radical milieu, she was unusually intense.
Firestone’s first book, “The Dialectic of Sex,” published when she was just twenty-five, is among the most sweeping and ambitious intellectual efforts of feminism’s second wave. A manifesto with a broad historical remit and a utopian futurist vision, “Dialectic” attempted to do for sex what Marx had done for class: explain how the sex distinction had created a hierarchy within which all other social relations were built. The book is confident, thorough, uninhibited, and often weird. It challenged not only marriage and the nuclear family but also how society treats children, along with pregnancy itself: Firestone famously compared childbirth to “shitting a pumpkin,” and called for a technological revolution after which “children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either.” When I first read it, I was about the age Firestone was when it was published, and the book’s passion and audacity impressed me. Rereading the book now, a decade later, I am struck most by its peculiar guilelessness. Firestone proceeded with what now scans to me today as uncanny fearlessness, venturing to the far edges of feminist thought.
Then she disappeared. When “The Dialectic of Sex” was published, in 1970, Firestone’s radical-feminist circles were devolving into ineffectual infighting. Ideological disagreements took on a personal sheen, and activist groups—never large in size—were splintering into smaller and smaller sects. It was a tendency that Firestone’s friend and fellow-radical Jo Freeman would famously term “trashing.” The factionalism and backstabbing left a bad taste in Firestone’s mouth. “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 in an irate letter to her sister Laya in 1970. Demoralized, she largely withdrew from radical politics, and from public life.
Twenty-eight years would pass before Firestone published “Airless Spaces.” Feminism would diminish in those years. The radical women’s movement of her youth mostly disappeared, with more than one of its luminaries suffering breakdowns or dying by suicide. Others, like the Ms.-magazine founder Gloria Steinem, professionalized, becoming academics or nonprofit honchos. By the mid-eighties, the larger feminist project had been dealt a severe blow with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. Meanwhile, those radicals who had followed in Firestone’s tradition set out on the vicious, years-long sororicidal battle over sexual politics that came to be known as the sex wars. Amid the wreckage, popular feminism in the United States ceased to be a matter of political organization and transformed instead into a personal identity. Firestone herself left the struggle behind, and embarked upon her own private disaster. The scholar Sianne Ngai quoting Ralph Ellison, in an essay on Firestone, referred to this period as the time when the writer “plunged outside history.”
“Airless Spaces” is not exactly a memoir, but it gives readers a sense of what happened in the interim: hospitals, institutions, welfare programs for the unemployable and very poor, case managers, psychiatrists, unremitting fear. In the stories, some of them no longer than a few paragraphs, Firestone depicts lonely, angry, frightened narrators at the margins of life, and though almost none are named as the author, she is often recognizable in her characters. Some of the vignettes are in the first person, with Firestone avowing the “I”; others are in the third person, with the distance of disidentification often allowing an even starker depiction of insanity’s loneliness and defeatism. Many of these protagonists endure the tedium and humiliation of involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations, losing days and years to paralyzing inertia, and experiencing terrifying delusions of persecution and betrayal.
If “The Dialectic of Sex” is almost breathlessly expansive, overflowing with enthusiasm for a newfound cause, “Airless Spaces” is shockingly cramped—grinding, slow, and punishing to read. The effect seems to have been felt by Firestone herself, too: among the losses she grieves in “Airless Spaces” is that of her intellect. “She had been reading Dante’s Inferno when first she went into the hospital,” she remembers, “and at quite a good clip too, but when she came out she couldn’t even get down a fashion rag; the words bounced off her forehead like it was steel.” Writing, too, is mirthless and effortful. “The old excitement of creation did not return, or if it did, it fizzled by morning after her nightly medication,” Firestone writes. “It was a dry fuck, every word painful and laborious.”
The mentally ill are easy to pity, but in Firestone’s telling they are difficult to like. The characters of “Airless Spaces” are often embittered and sarcastic. They are suspicious of doctors and angry at their few remaining friends. Many suspect that the professed concern and kindness of the sane world is little more than patronizing falseness and disgust: they frequently do not have a firm grasp on reality, but they are acutely, painfully aware of how they seem to others. They anxiously read the faces of those around them for confirmation that others see them as fearsome, ugly, or pitiful. Usually, they find it.
In the hospital, the patients are watched by doctors and other staff, whose gaze is not always benevolent. A room that inmates sneak off to nap in—a rare moment of peace—is converted into an office. They are constantly being instructed to participate in the ward’s “activities”—craft and stretching regimens that insult Firestone’s characters with their false cheer. Therapy has its own dangers. A patient named Margaret had cherished the attention of her psychiatrist, but flinches when she sees herself described by her doctor on a vocational training evaluation form as “well-nourished.” “Couldn’t she just call her fat or jowly and be done with it?” she thinks, and worries that she is a poor candidate for the training. Being seen and understood, perhaps every mental patient’s great hope, turns in a moment from a longed-for salvation into a dangerous exposure. “She had thought, somehow, that her shrink loved her. When no one else could,” Firestone writes. “Now where did she get that idea?”
