Freedom is a Life Beyond the Body: Automation and the Meaning of Work in Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex

• In Event: Intersectional Feminist Futures

Abstract

Testifying before Congress in 1955 on the subject of industrial automation, Walter Reuther, President of the United Automobile Workers, told lawmakers, “You know, you can automate the production of automobiles, but consumers are still made, thank God, in the old fashioned way. This is our trouble, this is our trouble, this is our trouble.”1 Fifteen years later, Shulamith Firestone agreed that the old fashioned way of making consumers was her trouble, too.

Since its publication in 1970, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex has inspired controversy among both feminists and anti-feminists. A groundbreaking work of radical feminism, her claim that sexist oppression resulted from women’s reproductive capacity remains a target both of conservative thinkers who wish to claim that women’s liberation is a crime against nature, as well as among radical feminists who are troubled by its de facto apology for sexism as an inevitable, apolitical product of nature. Firestone felt comfortable blaming sexism on female biology because she believed that soon “automation” would render biological reproduction obsolete, bringing about the downfall of the patriarchal family as well as capitalist exploitation. For Firestone, to be free and human was to possess a body unmarked by significant biological difference. In her eyes, the only force that could make biological difference politically insignificant was the technological abolition of work.

In recent years, Firestone’s defenders have tried to rescue her incisive criticism of racist, sexist, and classist oppression by downplaying the biological determinism of her argument. 2 This paper, rather than likewise avoid one of Firestone’s central claims, seeks to show that her definition of freedom as freedom from work was far from unique in midcentury America. Rather than read Firestone’s philosophy as aberrant, it behooves us to see how her arguments came from a widely shared conviction in postwar America that freedom meant freedom from labor and the necessities of the human body. Not only was Firestone working from the same presumptions about work, freedom, and technology that liberal feminists like Betty Friedan shared, but from ideas that were common across the political spectrum, from Black Liberation theorists to managers at the Ford Automobile Company. This paper will discuss some of the intellectual and political-economic roots of Firestone’s feminist criticism in midcentury ideas of work, showing how the escape from the body was a commonplace desire in the postwar United States, and that

the best way to make Firestone’s philosophy useful for intersectional liberation movements today is to dive deeply not only into her understanding of sex, but work.

Author

• Jason Resnikoff, Columbia University