At one point in “”Unable spaces“A large biography book on crazy and institutionalism by the extremist feminist Sholameth, the author recounts a scene where she runs an old teacher in the eastern village. Once, Verson was one of the stars’ students who did not abandon her soon. ”We barely talked,” she wrote about the meeting, “But the confession was certain. Take my entire position at a glance. “
Its position was comfortable. By the time it was written “Airless Spaces” – published in 1998 and prepared in February by Semiotext (E) – Firestone was inside and outside psychological hospitals for years, in multiple involuntary obligations, and it only had a delicate grip on reality. Before her first hospitalization, in 1987, she received the diagnosis of schizophrenia with greatness; The psychiatrist has long described it, Margaret Fraser, as Capros syndrome, a condition that made Verson believe that people were hiding behind “masks of their faces.”
For a while, Firestone was among the feminist intellectual life in New York. By the time when she walked in this street in the eastern village, the possibility that her professor watched was a long time ago. Most of them stopped writing and producing visual art; She lived in isolation, illusion, and unforgettable poverty.
Its mental health will decrease steadily, with rare and partial episodes only of remission. As Fireston’s disease advanced during the late 1980s and nineties, it has become increasingly irregular, and in the end is unable to basic tasks. Her sister Lea recalled a ring in which she summoned to New York by Malik Shuli: Verson was screaming at night, and she left her taps while rotting the floor plates. When she arrived Laya, her sister found Gaunt and Panhandling. Firestone has never regained permanent stability. Her body was found in her tenth eastern apartment, in 2012; Its owner has guessed that she had died for about a week. Due to the lack of food in her home, some speculated that Fireston had starvated to death.
Fireston’s transformation from an activist who had been in courageously and clearly criticized her world to a crazy woman who could not understand or work in it, and led to the inhabited at the second wave. In a memorial, feminist writer Kate Melit, a veterans in the institutionalization of psychiatry, suggested that Fireston’s retreat reflects the movement, and reading a corridor of “unabated spaces” in which Fireston writes that “her life has been destroyed, and she had no rescue plan.” “I think we should remember Shuli,” Melit said at the time. “Because we are in the same place now.”
Feminists have long understood themselves as TRTH -TELLERS, as two exhibitions on a lie hated women, as heroes, a vision of equality and dignity for women who are actually lies with their capabilities on the legend of their right role. But it seems that Fireston’s fate raises the dark possibility that this vision can push women mad. “Many women surrender in despair,” Verson once wrote about the feminist movement. “If this is a depth they do not want to know.” If sexual discrimination is based on a lie, as Firestone and her companions claim, what cost women to know the truth?
Firestone was one of the most fragile and bold leaders in the radical feminist movement, which is the small but influential group that starts from the new left, which is dominated by males in the late 1990s of the suggestion of a basic shift for political and private life on the basis of gender equality. It wrote the organizer and thought, and wrote some of the constituent paths of the movement – including contributions NotesThe annual journal for radical women in New York, such as its 1968 reading article, “The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States: a new point of view.” He also established organizing groups resulting from radical, first in Chicago and then in New York, and led the protests in a theatrical, unpleasant style. Feminal Suzan Valudi noticed that Fireston’s peers described it as a “fire”, and sometimes “fire ball”. Even according to the standards of the radical medium in the late 1960s, it was unusually intense.
Firestone’s first book,Gender“When she was twenty -five years old, she is among the most complete and ambitious intellectual efforts of the second wave of the women’s movement. A statement with a wide historical jurisdiction and a future utopian vision,“ dialectical ”she tried to do for sex, preferably strange, preferably strange. He challenged not only marriage and the nuclear family, but also how society treats children, along with the pregnancy itself: compare Firestone, the birth famous for “getting rid of the pumpkin”, called for a technological revolution and then “children are born to both sexes on an equal footing, or independently of either of them.”
Then it disappeared. When the “sex dialectic” was published, in 1970, the radical feminist circles in Firestone were turning into an ineffective economy. Ideological differences took a personal shine, and the active groups – which were not large in size – were divided into smaller and smaller sects. It was a tendency that Fireston’s friend and colleague in the attractive would become famous “garbage”. The factions and the rear paper left a bad taste in the mouth of Firestone. “I do not finally think that the revolution is so imminent that it deserves to be tampered with my entire psychological structure, and is subject to the rule of mobs, etc., which is all of them,” she wrote in an angry message to her sister Laya in 1970. She has withdrawn to a large extent of radical policy, and from public life.
It will last twenty -eight years before the deployment of Firestone “Airless Spaces”. Women will decrease in those years. The extremist women’s movement of its youth mostly disappeared, as it suffers more than one of its meters from its breakdowns or death by suicide. Others, like Ms.The founder of Magazine Gloria Steinem, professional, becomes academics or unhappy Honchos. By the mid -1980s, the largest feminist project was treated with a severe blow with the defeat of equality amendment. Meanwhile, these extremists who followed the Firestone traditions set out in the battle of the evil pesticide that lasted years ago on sexual politics that became known as sexual wars. Amidst the debris, the popular feminism in the United States stopped being the issue of political organization and instead turned into a personal identity. Firestone left itself the struggle behind it, and started a disaster of its own. Researcher Sian Nagai quotes from Ralph Ellson, in article In Firestone, this period is referred to as the time the writer fell out of history. “
“Smarts without Airless” are not exact notes, but they give readers a sense of what happened in the temporary period: hospitals, institutions, and social welfare programs for unemployed managers and the poor, cases managers, psychiatrists, and inherent fear. In stories, some of them are no longer more than a few paragraphs, as Firestone depicts lonely, angry and frightening narrators on the sidelines of life, and although almost nothing has not been called, they can often be recognized in their characters. Some short articles are found in the first person, with the burning of “I”; Others are in the third person, with a distance of determination often, which often allows more clear photography of crazy unit and defeat. Many of these heroes suffer from boredom and insult in non -voluntary psychological hospitals, and they lost days and years for paralysis of immobility, and the experience of terrifying delusions from persecution and betrayal.
If the “dialectical of sex” is almost an expansion, as it overflows with enthusiasm for a new reason, then the “non -air spaces” are shocked – slow, and punishing reading. The effect appears to be felt by Firestone itself, also: Among the losses that it grieves in “spaces without air” is her mind. “She was reading Dante Hell When I first went to the hospital, “you remember,” and in a very good clip too, but when you went out, you couldn’t even go to a cloth; He wore the words from her forehead as if they were steel. “Writing is also useless and stressful.
Mental patients are easy, but in telling Firestone that they are difficult to admire. The characters of “air -free spaces” are often exhausted and satirical. They are skeptical in doctors and angry with their remaining and remaining friends. Many doubt that anxiety and kindness teachers of the rational world are nothing more than sponsoring contempt and disgust: often they do not have a steady understanding of reality, but they realize sharply, and painful how they appear to others. They read impatiently the faces of those around them to confirm that others see them frightening, ugly or deplorable. Usually, they find it.
In the hospital, doctors and other employees are monitored by sick person whose outlook is always good. The room that sneaks the prisoners is converted into a nap in – a rare moment of peace – into an office. Instructions are constantly directed to participate in the “activities” of the wing – the expansion systems that insult Firestone characters with their wrong chant. Treatment has its own risks. A patient named Margaret was proud of the attention of her psychiatrist, but she was floundering when she sees herself prescribed by the doctor in the form of a professional training evaluation. I love it. When no one can, “Fireston writes.” Now where did you get this idea? “
