A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

32 | Shulamith Firestone, Social Defeat, and Sixties Radicalism

In September 2012, as I began to work on my talk for the 2012 New Insurgency conference, I was still absorbing the news of Shulamith Firestone’s death just a few weeks earlier. An architect of the women’s liberation movement, Firestone had died alone in her East Village apartment, a sixty-seven-year-old recluse who had spent much of her adult life in poor health and with very little money. It had not always been like that. Firestone helped shape the women’s movement, both on the ground in New York City and in her 1970 classic The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Dubbed “the little red book for women,” Dialectic was for many of us the breakthrough text. Over the years in both my writing and my teaching, I have returned time and again to her audacious manifesto of women’s liberation.

I chose to make Firestone the subject of my talk even though in many ways she is not an obvious choice for a conference commemorating the Port Huron Statement. After all, the Port Huron Statement’s obliviousness to women—emblematic of early 1960s Mad Men America—embodied precisely what Firestone so memorably identified in the first line of Dialectic: “Sex class is so deep as to be invisible.”[2] As for Firestone herself, she was not among the many women whose feminism was forged in complicated ways through their long-term, committed participation in the New Left and the civil rights movement. To the best of my knowledge, she was never a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the group that produced the 1962 manifesto. In fact, Firestone had only limited contact with New Left groups, and those experiences left her feeling exasperated and fed up. In the wake of one particularly disastrous encounter with the left, the 1969 counterinaugural protest, where feminist speakers were taunted and harassed (cries of “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” drowned out one speaker), Firestone argued that the left had blown its last chance with feminists. In an article in the left-wing paper, The Guardian, she wrote, “Women’s liberation is dynamite. And we have more important things to do than to try to get you to come around.” And then she cut to the chase. “Fuck off, left. You can examine your navel by yourself from now on. We’re starting our own movement.”[3]

Despite the role that she played in forging an autonomous women’s movement, Firestone’s story is a part of the history of the left—or it should be. And that’s because her analysis made socialism integral to radical feminism. However, it is not primarily her political investments that interest me in this chapter; rather, it is her life and in particular her relationship to the women’s movement and what that can tell us about the sixties. Firestone’s relationship to this movement was fraught, and I don’t want to suggest that her life was typical. Nonetheless, her life can open a window onto the ways in which the political movements and countercultural scenes—however transformative they may have been at the level of the social—were sometimes downright debilitating to participants themselves.

 
Firestone grew up in a large Orthodox Jewish family in the Midwest, first in Kansas City and then in St. Louis. The eldest daughter, she was precocious and feisty and often found herself battling her controlling father, who insisted that the family keep to a strict Orthodox regime. Shulamith may have felt embattled in her family, but she was extremely close to her older brother, Daniel. So strong was their connection that she skipped a year of high school in order to be with him at Washington University, where he was already a student. By her sophomore year, however, she was no longer observant, and that led to an irreparable, possibly violent end to their friendship. Daniel never spoke to her again. Rather than remain in St. Louis, she transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her bachelor of fine arts in 1967.

During her college years, Firestone protested racial discrimination through her connection to a friend in the Catholic Worker movement. Still, by comparison to many early women’s liberationists who had extensive resumes of political activism, Firestone had only a slim dossier. That would change in 1967 with the National Conference for a New Politics (NCNP), held in Chicago during Labor Day weekend. The NCNP was an ill-fated attempt to unite the disparate factions of what was then called the “Movement.” Women’s liberation was not yet one of those factions, but Movement women were already meeting to talk about what they soon took to calling “sexism.”

The NCNP marked a turning point in these fledgling feminists’ relationship to the left. The failure of conference organizers to address women’s issues anywhere in their agenda led a group of nearly fifty women to come together as a caucus and to produce just such a resolution. When representatives of that group took their resolution to the conference’s resolution committee, they were told that the conference already had its resolution on women, which the peace group, Women Strike for Peace (WSP), had submitted. The WSP resolution concerned peace, not women, and Jo Freeman, a member of the women’s caucus and veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, knew that and was steaming mad. Still, she believes nothing more would have happened had she not run into Firestone on her way out of the hall. Feeding each other’s anger, Firestone and Freeman stayed up all night drafting an alternate resolution, which grew more and more radical the more they talked. In it, they called for the revamping of marriage, divorce, and property laws, and they condemned the mass media’s sexual objectification of women. But they didn’t stop there, arguing that women should have “complete control” over their bodies, including access to abortion and birth control information. When the two women tried to present their resolution to the assembled participants, they were shoved aside, and the chairman of the proceedings patted Firestone on the head and said, “Cool down, little girl; we have more important issues to talk about here than women’s problems.” Furious at being dismissed and with such imperiousness, Firestone and Freeman channeled their anger. They managed, in the words of feminist Ann Snitow, to “invent an indignation and a new vision of how women are oppressed,” which, as she recalls, “we all embraced ten minutes later.”[4]

Within a week, Chicago’s first women’s liberation group formed, but Firestone only stayed in Chicago for another month. Many thought she was moving to New York to pursue her art, and she herself wrote that she moved there to pursue a career in painting and writing.[5] Some who knew her in Chicago have since said that she moved away to escape an abusive boyfriend.[6] Whatever the reason, upon arriving in New York, she helped form New York City’s first women’s liberation group. Almost immediately Firestone became a force to be reckoned with in that group—a group with no shortage of strong-minded and opinionated young women in its ranks. It was this group of mostly left-wing women, New York Radical Women (NYRW), that pioneered consciousness-raising (C-R). C-R, which would become enshrined in the movement as the essential feminist practice, was meant to both pull away the blinkers of women’s accommodation to the system and form the basis of theory. It was not intended to be therapy, although C-R did have a therapeutic effect, and, over time, it did indeed evolve into a therapeutic practice.

NYRW staged actions as well as engaging in C-R sessions. In August 1968 its members were among the women’s liberationists who made headlines when they protested the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. It was on the boardwalk that demonstrators startled onlookers by throwing various “instruments of torture,” including bras, into a “Freedom Trash Can.” Despite reports of bra burning, no bras were even singed that day. Earlier, in January 1968 NYRW agreed to take part in the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a women’s antiwar protest in Washington, DC. NYRW opposed the war, but members of the group also opposed the march, at least in the way that older women in the pacifist left had conceived it. Firestone was among those who most forcefully took the position that the march was wrongheaded in presuming that being a woman had anything at all to do with opposing war. And in a separate action, she and others in NYRW staged a Burial of Traditional Womanhood—meant as a rebuke of the left-leaning Women Strike for Peace, the group most involved in the planning of the march. (This is one of the moments in the history of the second wave that underscores that as much as women’s liberation borrowed from the first wave, it was distinct from it, much like the New Left was indebted to but distinct from the Old Left.) It was in a leaflet for this demonstration that the expression “Sisterhood is Powerful” first turned up, followed by the exhortation “Humanhood the Ultimate.”

Ultimately, the exploration of “humanhood” would be pursued without their brothers on the left, as Firestone and other women’s liberationists emulated the separatist path recently forged by Black Power activists. This was perhaps an easier road for Firestone to take than for many others, for whom an autonomous movement felt like nothing so much as treachery against long-term, cherished comrades, especially at this moment when the country seemed to teeter on the brink of revolution.

Eventually, feminism’s divorce from the left would have serious consequences for the prospects of making change in the United States. Women’s liberation was dynamite, and the left could have benefited from feminists’ energy and analysis. Instead, the left floundered and collapsed as sectarian madness and vanguard posturing won the day. As for the radical feminism that Firestone helped create, it carved out oppositional understandings of marriage, the family, sexuality, gendered violence, and gender itself, much of which is today completely taken for granted. As a movement, radical feminism flourished for a few years, but its disconnection from the left had a downside, too, as strategies for structural change lost ground to schemes of self-transformation. Activist and writer Meredith Tax recalls that about three years into women’s liberation, she began to question whether the movement’s understanding of politics hadn’t grown too capacious. What did it mean, she wondered, when activists believed that repairing their cars was a matter of political significance akin to, say, participating in a demonstration? “I worried about what else was going to happen,” she recalled. “This wasn’t going to be the whole thing, was it?”[7]

Whatever its long-term consequences, the break with the left had an energizing effect on the women’s liberation movement. Throughout parts of the country, but perhaps nowhere more intensely than in New York City, the months that followed featured demonstrations, speak-outs, sit-ins, proliferating manifestoes, and an intensity that is today hard to capture. Throughout it all, Firestone was like a girl on fire. Snitow worked alongside her in this period and remembers Firestone as “aflame, incandescent,” someone whose company she found “thrilling.”[8]

Firestone was an artist, and a highly articulate one at that. She wrote for and edited a crucial 1968 collection called Notes from the First Year, a record of the first year of women’s liberation. (It is worth noting that, as the title suggests, Firestone understood from the very beginning that they were making history.) This annual journal was Firestone’s “baby,” recalls veteran women’s liberation activist Carol Hanisch.[9] It was in Notes from the Second Year (1969) that Firestone and her coeditor Anne Koedt called on women to “dare to be bad”—that is, to refuse the habituated niceness that was the bedrock of femininity. It was in this period that Firestone came up with her idea of a “dream” feminist action: a smile boycott, an idea that has lost none of its currency, as evidenced by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s recent art project “Stop Telling Women to Smile.”[10]

With journalist Ellen Willis, also of NYRW, Firestone went on to found Redstockings, which, in contrast to NYRW, was meant to be an explicitly radical feminist group. There would be no more wafflers in this group. After organizing a number of important actions, including two around abortion, the group shifted focus and concentrated on C-R. Firestone was not the only Redstockings member made uneasy by the C-R turn, but it was the emerging concern with movement elitism that soured her on the group. As spokeswomen for women’s liberation emerged from the ranks, so did the worry that the new movement would be hierarchized like every other movement. Soon Firestone and Willis found themselves attacked as “elitist” for allowing the media to single them out as the quotable leaders of this new movement. Firestone, who was unapologetically intense, articulate, and brainy, found herself pretty much always under attack. She had refused to capitulate to the self-abnegation that her family and the larger culture had pressed on her, and she wasn’t about to capitulate now because her so-called sisters were calling for it. In contrast to many other feminists who shut up and went along with the feminist reworking of the nice girl, Firestone did little to disguise her impatience with what she judged “all the noodling over egalitarianism,” according to her friend and feminist coconspirator Ellen Willis.[11]

Firestone left Redstockings to form another group with Anne Koedt, a friend and the author of “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” perhaps the most “impactful” article to emerge from the women’s liberation movement. Their ambition was to create an organization that would not end in acrimony and division but that would generate a mass-based radical feminist movement. They called it New York Radical Feminists (NYRF), and they devised a structure for the group that they believed would be both democratic and structured, one that would “seed itself” with small groups or “brigades,” as they called them in sixties fashion. The founding brigade named itself Stanton-Anthony after that famous and dynamic first-wave duo—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Two years of the women’s movement also made Koedt and Firestone wary of dogma and hardened lines. “WE DO WHAT WORKS” was the way Firestone summed up their approach. However, what didn’t work, at least for some of the group’s newcomers, was the group’s explicit hierarchy, in which new brigades went through a six-month probationary period in which members spent three months reading and discussing feminist literature and another three months engaged in C-R. “Why must we defer to the group’s founders?” some might have asked. “What makes them better or wiser feminists than us?” Tensions came to a head early on when the members voted to strike down the brigade structure. Firestone and Koedt declined to fight and with some others in the founding brigade decided to walk away from the group. After the meeting, Firestone reportedly showed up at a friend’s place and said, “They threw me out and that’s it.”[12] Tired of perennially returning to square one at each and every meeting, weary of attacks on her leadership, Firestone opted to write about feminism rather than to participate in any of its organizations.

Certainly, the attacks on leaders, which her onetime ally Jo Freeman later dubbed “trashing,” made the movement a tricky, destabilizing place for Firestone. According to her editor at William Morrow, members of one of the groups of which Firestone was a member actually demanded that the group rather than Firestone own the copyright to Dialectic. While it seemed to some that Firestone had ditched NYRF and the larger movement, she understood her experience quite differently—as one of exile. “It was like she had been rejected by her family,” said one friend.[13] Maybe a better way to put it is that the family she had chosen had rejected her just as her biological family had.

By the time Dialectic appeared in bookstores in fall 1970, Firestone had been out of the movement for a good six months. However, readers would not have known that its author felt herself an exile from the movement she had helped create. She wrote as an impassioned partisan, noting only that, for strong women, the movement created the dilemma of “having to eradicate, at the same time, not only their submissive natures, but their dominant natures as well, thus burning their candle at both ends.”[14]

Dialectic was a thrilling read. Years ago in a review of the book, on the occasion of its reissue, I characterized her feminist reworkings of Freud, Marx, and Engels as “always bold, sometimes breathtaking, and occasionally weird,” and I would stand by that judgment.[15] What was most nervy (and problematic) about the book was her contention that families are where dominance and submission are learned and come to feel familiar. She credited Marx with the insight that the “family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later developed on a wide scale within society.”[16] Like a good deal of radical feminism, her theorizing about the family, which, as others have noted, operates as a bulwark against racism even as it reinforces gender asymmetry, was obtuse about its own racial specificity.

Radical feminism of the sort advanced by Firestone in Dialectic insisted on feminism’s organizational autonomy from the left but took for granted that theoretically socialism was central to the radical feminist project. Even as she dismissed Marx and Engels as knowing next to nothing about women’s oppression, she embraced Marxist method and accepted much of their wisdom about class oppression. At the time of its publication, this was hardly an unusual stance among radical feminists, but over time, left analysis would drop out of radical feminism.

There was nothing cautious about Dialectic, and her more dubious bits of analysis gave its critics ammunition to dismiss the whole book. Reviewers across the political spectrum savaged parts of her analysis—her characterization of pregnancy as barbaric, the promotion of artificial reproduction as the key to women’s liberation, her advocacy of sexual freedom for women and children. As for her conviction that heterosexuality could be harnessed to revolutionary ends through women’s boycotting of sex, that would soon become outdated in many radical feminist circles as lesbianism became the revolutionary way forward.

Although Dialectic had its defenders, and some of its prescriptions for change have come true, the book was disavowed even by many in the movement. It stood accused of multiple sins, but two stood out. One was that its analysis was male identified in its embrace of socialism, technology, and polymorphous sexuality. The other criticism lodged against it was that the utopia it advanced could usher in a cybernetic Brave New World. Firestone anticipated many of the criticisms against her, including the charge—one that resonated across feminism’s political spectrum—that she wanted to transform women into men. She explained she didn’t want to “draft women into a male world” but rather she wanted to eliminate the gender distinction altogether.[17] Today, Firestone’s conviction that getting rid of nature is the way forward is the stuff of gender studies classes. Before Donna Haraway rejected the goddess for the cyborg, before Judith Butler began troubling gender, there was Firestone and, before her, of course, the writer who helped inspire Dialectic, Simone de Beauvoir. But Firestone’s orientation toward collective solutions and her commitment to socialism increasingly dropped out of the radical feminist analysis and came to reside solely within socialist feminism, which increasingly became an academic orbit.

The immediate reaction to her book, in many ways the most daring of all the women’s liberation books yet published, would have challenged even the most emotionally resilient. First there was the avalanche of publicity it generated, which Firestone reportedly found “unbearable.”[18] And then there were the reviews. In The New York Times, critic John Leonard acknowledged her “brilliant mind” but sneered at the extremity of her formulations.[19] And closer to home, there was her father who called Dialectic “the joke book of the century” and refused to read it.[20]

Firestone continued to have ideas, but book and art projects went uncompleted. She grew reclusive, and her behavior became increasingly erratic. Her older brother Daniel’s suicide in 1974 was a key event in her emotional unraveling, which would eventually be diagnosed as something more serious and debilitating than the generic nervous breakdown. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1981 the death of her father, her antagonist and perhaps, as her sister Tirzah suggests, her “ballast” as well, precipitated her further decline.[21] By 1987 she was in and out of hospitals. There was, according to those movement friends whom she consented to see, a medicated mellowness about her, antithetical to the fiery activist they remembered. In the mid-1990s, a support group of younger women broke through her reclusiveness, and for a while they managed to make a difference. At their urging she wrote Airless Spaces, her memoirish book of stories about her medicalized, hospitalized life, which was published in 1998. But when her support group slowly came apart, Firestone’s condition deteriorated, and she found herself once again in those airless spaces. Still, some old movement friends reported seeing her occasionally until 2010.[22] In late August 2012, when her building superintendent discovered her tiny body face down in her apartment, she had reportedly been dead for several days.

Firestone’s life and the larger story of “second-wave” feminism raise a number of questions that pivot on the relationship between political movements and trauma. Were the movements of the “long sixties” uniquely traumatizing to participants? Was the women’s movement unusually bruising? And was there something about postwar US culture that made sixties rebels especially vulnerable both to the contentiousness and divisiveness of movement life and to the feelings of loneliness and despair that sometimes haunted them following movement collapse?

In her eloquent and thoughtful 2013 New Yorker article, “Death of a Revolutionary,” Susan Faludi comes at this somewhat differently. She asks why it was that Firestone and so many other feminist leaders of her generation were “unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create.” In Firestone’s case, Faludi believes that schizophrenia was the culprit. However, in her discussion of the disease, she emphasizes that the key risk factors for schizophrenia all involve chronic isolation and loneliness—a condition that two experts on schizophrenia have called “social defeat.” Faludi goes on to explicitly connect the researchers’ idea of social defeat with the devastating social defeat that many radical feminists experienced, especially as the movement did what movements always do—that is, wind down and die. She quotes Kate Millett, who in 1998 mourned those pioneering feminists who had “disappeared to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion or vanished into asylums.”[24] Faludi so lingers on the failed sisterhood of second-wave feminism that readers cannot be blamed for thinking that, however much social good feminism achieved, the movement was nothing short of a disaster for many of the women who created it.

The idea that sisterhood was powerfully destructive has proven to be the most controversial aspect of Faludi’s essay. Her account of trashing led some, such as the left-wing writer and cultural critic Eli Zaretsky, to conclude that the radical feminist milieu in which Firestone moved was “truly mad.”[25] Longtime feminist writer and activist Susan Brownmiller, who refused to speak with Faludi for her article, criticized her for not emphasizing NYRF’s many (post-Firestone) accomplishments and observed that long-term participation in any political movement requires nothing short of “nerves of steel.” Lest anyone think that incivility had died with the women’s movement, Brownmiller demonstrated otherwise when she accidentally tweeted a private wish, that Faludi “burn in hell.”[26]

I was one of many people whom Susan Faludi consulted in researching Firestone’s life. In our conversation, she sounded almost haunted by how much misery marked the lives of so many feminist veterans. In her essay she notes their “painful solitude, poverty, infirmity, mental illness, and even homelessness.”[27] Some thirty years earlier, when I was working on my dissertation on a history of radical feminism, I met and interviewed about twenty-five veterans of New York women’s liberation. Some were doing just fine, particularly those who were working as academics and/or writers. But almost as many appeared to be just scraping by. That they were even able to make ends meet in a rapidly gentrifying city had everything to do with the fact that they had not budged from their rent-controlled apartments in many, many years. But that occurred to me a long while later.

At the time I believed that what I was seeing was a determined and admirable bohemianism, and that was likely a part of it. But as a thirtysomething grad student accustomed to living on the margins, I never thought about old age and how that might upend their carefully calibrated lives, driving some from near poverty into the real thing. But then, to me they seemed resilient and plucky. At times I felt exasperated by the wariness with which some responded to me, but given the media’s many mischaracterizations of the movement, this did not seem entirely unreasonable. It is true that the laser-like precision and righteous certitude with which activists recalled fifteen-year-old debates left me wondering how much else had happened in their lives since those turbocharged early years of women’s liberation. More disquieting was the discomfort caused by mentions of Firestone. No one was specific, but I understood she was not in good shape. Still, I did not see the point of dwelling on the casualties of the movement. I didn’t want my book to become yet another occasion for an attack on the movement and the women who made it. After all, by this point—the mid- to late 1980s—we were already deep in backlash territory with book after book proclaiming the folly of feminism, the movement that they argued had managed to hurt women more than it had helped them.

Thirty years later, we are in a different place. We have nothing to gain from remaining silent. And if we don’t have these discussions now, when will we? This seems to me an ideal occasion to launch these conversations since it was the Port Huron Statement that argued for a politics that “give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social, and economic sources of their private troubles.”[28] Let’s take seriously that exhortation and apply it to movements that were meant to bring us comfort, bring us together, and create community where there had been loneliness and anomie. It is time we recognized that what Faludi terms social defeat is best understood not as a personal concern or individual failing but rather as a collective phenomenon with social roots.

My interest in this subject owes something to my career-long engagement with the long sixties. As the author of two monographs about different parts of the sixties—women’s liberation in Daring to Be Bad and the hippie counterculture in Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin—I’ve thought a good deal about the shared territory of rebellion in the sixties. The quest for “real life,” the embrace of frame-breaking experiences, the search for personal authenticity, the reinvention of self, and the twin (and competing) desires for greater community and a more full-bodied individualism were not uniquely the province of the boomer generation, but they were given full-throttle expression in the sixties. Of course, these movements and scenes were distinct phenomena—countercultural hippies and political activists did not always regard each other as allies, for example—nonetheless, there exists considerable common ground. My aim is to tackle the fallout from the sixties and its aftermath with a focus on the lives of those who put their bodies on the line in all the many ways in which people in that period did. I don’t mean in any way to foreclose further discussion of how government repression undermined radicalism. What follows is not a recanting but a reckoning, a melancholy one at that. After all, the incompleteness of what we achieved and the feelings of social defeat that this engendered owe a lot to what happened next.

That feeling also owes a lot to what happened before. Sixties radicals saw themselves engaged in a great refusal of the 1950s, but they were profoundly shaped by that period. Even though the 1950s were not nearly as quiescent as some would have it—for example, change was already afoot with the civil rights movement, the Beats, and rock ’n’ roll—for many kids, particularly white, middle-class kids marooned in the suburbs, these were years of an adventure shortage. Their desire for real, authentic life, full of connection and meaning, represented a kind of blowback against the low-wattage lives of their parents, whose experience of the Great Depression and World War II led them to construct circumscribed lives in which security and comfort were paramount.

This generational conflict is repeated time and again in accounts of the sixties. “I’d rather have 10 years of superhypermost than live to be 70 by sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV” was how Janis Joplin described it.[29] For Peter Coyote of the Diggers and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the point was to “lay life.”[30] Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party counseled “revolutionary suicide,” and members of the SDS splinter group Weatherman managed to achieve something like that in the disastrous Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that left three of its members dead. But even in the early part of the sixties, activists were putting their bodies on the line in sit-ins and freedom rides. For many activists and counterculture freaks alike, the feeling was, “If you’ve got a light, burn it out.”[31] Firestone put it differently, but there’s no doubt that she wanted to burn. In a documentary about her, the twenty-two-year-old Firestone worried she hadn’t yet accomplished enough: “I want to do something. Instead of beauty and power occasionally, I want to achieve a world where it’s there all the time, in every word and every brushstroke, and not just now and then.”[32] Life with the amp set at thirteen was a risky, sometimes scary enterprise that not everyone survived. There’s no way to make sense of our penchant for high-risk living without understanding how much it was shaped by the postwar years and our parents’ zeal for living small.

Just as the adventure shortage encouraged life at full tilt, so did feelings of isolation drive the desire for relatedness and community. Indeed the Port Huron Statement made the case for politics as the vehicle through which community would be forged and isolation banished. The civil rights movement succeeded in some measure because of the bonds of community it forged. Firestone looked for a way to undo the tyranny of marriage and the social oblivion it visited upon singles in Dialectic. “Only in Manhattan is single living even tolerable,” she observed, “and that can be debated.”[33] The desire to make women—single women—a part of the fabric of social life is central to the text. Circumstances varied, of course, but for many young radicals, the search for community—whether on the dance floor at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, at an antiwar march in Gainesville, or at a C-R group in St. Paul—was made all the more pressing because their own family ties were so attenuated and their own nonconformity had left them isolated and alone. The yearning for community and the desire for heightened experience made the collapse of these movements and communities all the more difficult for participants to accept and to absorb. Recalling the period when the counterculture of San Francisco began to crumble, one scenester says, “There was such pain and suffering it’s almost beyond bearing.”[34]

However much sixties rebels desired community, they also had an equally strong desire for unfettered personal freedom. How many communes and countercultural enterprises fell apart over this tension between the community and the individual? Even rock music impresario Bill Graham maintained that it was a “tragedy” that the San Francisco bands—the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company among others—“never really did anything communally.”[35] In more explicitly political movements, community faced other impediments, particularly because of the way in which politics came to be practiced. The impulse to live one’s politics was there from the very beginning and was manifested in a willingness to take risks—whether that meant confronting the police or becoming a poorly paid community organizer, ­all the while subjecting oneself to a steady diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But as advanced in the Port Huron Statement, the idea that the personal is political was more of an organizing strategy, a way of getting people to connect their dissatisfaction with, say, police harassment or inadequate city services, to systemic discrimination and injustice.

Women’s liberation originally used the idea of personal politics in that way, too, suggesting that personal circumstances—say, who did the dishes, made the beds, cared for the kids, or enjoyed the orgasms—needed to be reframed not as an individual problem but as a social problem that needed to be addressed through collective political action. But here’s the thing: once personal politics crossed over into feminism, it came to entail an analysis of personal life itself and the power that inhered within it. Much of the power of women’s liberation lay in its rendering of personal life as political. But in practice “the personal is political” came to sanction the personal as the foremost site of political change, which in turn opened up everything from hairstyles to sexual styles and sexual partners to critique. With personal life corralled to conform to ever-shifting notions of political purity, is it any wonder that trashing became so endemic and so terrifyingly personal?

 
Social movements are ephemeral, and there was no one reason for the decline of women’s liberation or any other movement of the 1960s. Faludi emphasizes the inability of Firestone and some other early feminists to live in a world they had transformed. It’s true that Firestone et al. set in motion changes that transformed our landscape; it’s perhaps even truer that what didn’t change was what proved their undoing, contributing to the terrible feeling of social defeat.

Just as vexing was the way in which parts of the sixties, such as personal expressiveness and do-it-yourself ingenuity, were appropriated in ways that made movement harder and that seem horribly ironic today. Think of the hippie maxim “Do your thing” or those San Francisco anarchists, the Diggers, and their bit of wisdom, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” whose resonance one bank recognized and lifted for a “hip” ad campaign. Think of all that affordable co-op whole-wheat bread and what it eventually became: artisanal bread at $6 a loaf. Think of feminism’s advocacy of control and empowerment—through gynecological self-exams, masturbation, and the strategic deployment of sex toys.

And consider how this program of self-empowerment was hijacked and given a neoliberal spin. Others have written about this, and they disagree about the extent to which feminism is at fault by allowing what Hester Eisenstein calls the “political economy of feminism” to fall away.[36] Angela McRobbie, for example, focuses instead on the way in which the neoliberal privatizing of everything in conjunction with consumer capitalism appropriated the feminist discourse of empowerment, choice, and freedom, all the while discrediting feminism as a social movement.[37] But as I have indicated, feminism was not the only sixties movement to find parts of its rhetoric and agenda taken up by the forces it opposed and in ways that both changed and maintained business as usual.[38]

None of this could have been predicted. Who knew that “do your own thing” and “do it yourself”—taking control of your body and your life—would prepare the ground for a very different ethos in which the collective good and social responsibility were overwhelmed by something parading as freedom, choice, and empowerment? Shulamith Firestone didn’t know this either, but she knew that the Movement could not lose sight of the need for transformative structural change. When the Movement collapsed—and we’re still feeling its collapse—she, and many others, were unprotected. Kate Millett said about Firestone that she was someone who, having lived her adult life in the Movement, was not prepared for the “real world”—especially, I would add, one in which a vision of solidarity and social responsibility no longer much figured, a world in which “do it yourself” had given way to go it alone.