Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 2015 ✓

The author would like to note that this book remains unbabridged and unrevised since its original publication in 1970.

Perhaps she has overshot her mark: Why postulate a fundamental Hegelian concept of Otherness as the final explanation and then carefully document the bioloical and historical circumstances that have pushed the class ‘women’ into such a category — when one has never seriously considered the much simpler and more likely possibility that this fondamental dualism spring fom the sexual division itself? To posit a priori cateories of thought and existence — ‘Otherness’, ‘Transcendence’, ‘Immanence’ — into which history then falls may not be necessary. Marx and Engels had discovered that these philosophical categories themselves grew out of history.

Before assuming such categories, let us first try to develop an analysis in which biology itself — procreation — is at the origin of the dualism. The immediate assumption of the layman that the unequal division of the sexes is ‘natural’ may be well-founded. We need not immediately look beyond this. Unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equal. Although, as De Beauvoir points out, this difference of itself did not necessitate the development of a class system — the domination of one group by another — the reproductive functions of these differences did. The biological family is an inherently unequal power distribution. The need for power leading to the development of classes arises from the psychosexual formation of each individual according to this basic imbalance, rather than, as Freud, Norman O. Brown, and others have, once again overshooting their mark, postulated, some irreducible conflict of Life against Death, Eros vs. Thanatos.

The biological family — the basic reproductive unit of male/female/infant, in whatever form of social organization — is characterized by these fundamental — if not immutable — facts:

(1) That women throughout history before the advent of birth control were at the continual mercy of their biology — menstruation, menopause, and ‘female ills’, constant painful childbirth, wetnursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males (whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government, community-at-large) for physical survival.

(2) That human infants take an even longer time to grow up than animals, and thus are helpless and, for some short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival.

(3) That a basic mother/child interdependency has existed in some form in every society, past or present, and thus has shaped the psychology of every mature female and every infant.

(4) That the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labour at the origins of class, as well as furnishing the paradigm of caste (discrimination based on biological characteristics).

These biological contingencies of the human family cannot be covered over with anthropological sophistries. Anyone observing animals mating, reproducing, and caring for their young will have a hard time accepting the ‘cultural relativity’ line. For no matter how many tribes in Oceania you can find where the connection of the father to fertility is not known, no matter how many matrilineages, no matter how many cases of sex-role reversal, male housewifery, or even empathic labour pains, these facts prove only one thing: the amazing flexibility of human nature. But human nature is adaptable to something, it is, yes, determined by its environmental conditions. And the biological family that we have described has existed everywhere throughout time.