Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012) was a founder of the women's liberation movement and editor of Notes, a journal of radical feminism. A key figure of second-wave feminism, Firestone is best known for her groundbreaking work The Dialectic of Sex.

"The Dialectic of Sex is one of my all-time favorite books--a deft and profound recontextualization of the insights of Marx, Engels, and Freud. It's a miracle to me that anyone was able to write such a radical, revelatory, concise, and down-to-earth book at age twenty-five. The fact that Shulamith Firestone wasn't hailed as a world-historical genius, and was instead driven out of her mind by crazy-making people and systemic forces, is a grim testament to the visionary nature of her thought. I couldn't be more eager for any book to reach a new generation of readers." -- Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

"Shulamith Firestone transformed the raw material of her life into a theoretical work that merged spectacularly with its moment: part diagnosis, part prophecy, The Dialectic of Sex helped launch the women's liberation movement. Nearly sixty years later, her observations about love, sex, culture, and the family land like a fistful of darts, demanding readers confront the possibility that social relations could be dramatically different. The Dialectic is a book to argue with, to make you laugh, seethe, and see things freshly, no matter how many times you reread it. Just as Firestone built upon Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, so with this generous offering she places herself in the great chain of radical thinkers. Where will we take it from here?" -- Lana Dee Povitz, Associate Professor of History, Middlebury College

"Before I read Firestone, I didn't know that you could question things like the family or romance. I didn't know that kind of thinking was even possible . . . May young women in search of new ways to be set aside their Joan Didion and Naomi Wolf and pick up Dialectic of Sex instead." --Madeleine Schwartz, n+1

"When one remembers that the feminist bookshelf wasn't a foot long in 1970, the fullness, clarity and force of Firestone's feminism is simply amazing. . . Her analysis of women's daily experience--in love, in sex, in (mostly repressed) world-building--is as fresh and right as it seemed then; I regret to say this part of her work hasn't dated at all." - Ann Snitow, Dissent

"I love--sometimes to the point of weeping--[Dialectic's] absolute negationism, its horniness, and its sincerity. . . If we are generously inclined, The Dialectic of Sex can serve as a reminder that the wretched of the earth can and must harness science, remake nature, and unleash universal equality and joy." - Sophie Lewis, The Nation

"There is something bracingly, distressingly contemporary in Firestone's insights." - Jennifer Szalai, n+1

"The Dialectic of Sex. . . verges on the silvered edge of science fiction. The book floats like an opaline shape behind silhouetted winter branches, a cross-hatched, shining sky-thing, confounding yet airborne. A precocious manifesto of total feminist revolution, it is wildly flawed, and wildly far-flung; it is this wildness that has sustained it longer than much of the other cultural production of its milieu." -- Audrey Wollen, Harper's

Publisher: Picador USA

Pub date: 2027-02-09

Length: 240 pages