Second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulamith_Firestone) recently died in New York City.
What caught my attention, as the news circulated on my Facebook friends feed, was the proto-transhumanist elements in her work, the 1970 tome _The Dialectic of Sex_. (The first chapter is available at http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialec....) These two sensitive obituaries (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/eulogy-for-a-sex-rad..., http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/08/shulamith-firestone...) capture her central point that women's liberation is impossible so long as women alone bear the burden of childbirth. In order to free women, technology has to be developed to decouple gender from childbearing.
These biological contingencies of the human family cannot be covered over with anthropological sophistries. one and caring. for their observing animals mating, reproducing 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 o 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. Even in matriarchies where woman's fertility is worshipped, and the father's role is unknown or unimportant, if perhaps not on the genetic father, there is still some dependence of the female and the infant on the male. And though it is true that the nuclear family is only a recent development, one which, as I shall attempt to show, only intensifies the psychological penalties of the biological family, though it is true that throughout history there have been many variations on this biological family, the contingencies I have described existed in dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, all of them, causing specific psychosexual distortions in the human personality. But to grant that the sexual imbalance of power is biologically based is not to lose our case. We are no longer just animals. And the kingdom of nature does not reign absolute. As Simone de Beauvoir herself admits:The Eclipse Phase future, for all of its terrifying failings, has achieved that decoupling.The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some important truths. Humanity is not an animal species, it is a historical reality. Human society is an antiphysis - in a sense it is against nature; it does not passively submit to the presence of nature but rather takes over the control of nature on its own behalf. This arrogation is not an inward, subjective operation; it is accomplished objectively in practical action.Thus the 'natural' is not necessarily a 'human' value. Humanity has begun to transcend Nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it.
