Never a Patient Woman

Emmeline Clein finds pockets of faith in feminist writer Shulamith Firestone's ostensibly airless spaces in an essay from LARB Quarterly no. 45: “Submission.”

By Emmeline CleinJune 24, 2025

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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TWO RADICAL FEMINISTS turned perennial mental patients sit in a squalid walk-up, talking. They have bones to pick with each other’s polemics—not an uncommon problem between second-wave feminism’s mischievous demon spawn, so prone to grand entrances and Irish exits—but this visit wasn’t meant to be about politics. Valerie Solanas is rolling a cigarette, “carefully and with concentration, Big Top.”

Our narrator gifts Valerie an underground newspaper. Gratitude, laughter, stringy hair, smoke in the air; Valerie “waxe[s] paranoid.” Apparently, the media is out to get her, which doesn’t strike the narrator as particularly implausible: paranoiacs are prophetic poets as often as they are systems theorists. That night, she dreams of Valerie attacking her and, years later, runs into her on St. Mark’s Place panhandling, coughing up phlegm. Valerie gurgles threats; our narrator is too afraid of her, she writes, to invite her into her sublet for warmth, maybe a meal. She claims to be afraid of getting hurt by her, but beneath that terror might crouch another: of becoming her.

1987: a woman is discovered panhandling in the East Village, a hammer in her hand and epithets leaking from her cracked lips. Another day, a friend finds this woman—the writer and organizer Shulamith Firestone, the author-cum-narrator of the story above—wandering the streets, calling herself Kathy. Firestone’s sister commits her to Payne Whitney, the first of many mental institutions she would be forced to call home over the coming decades. Only 17 years earlier, a 25-year-old Firestone had published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, a slim book with world-historical sweep; a brazenly totalizing, militantly playful feminist manifesto arguing that sex oppression undergirded all other oppressions. In 1970, Dialectic hit shelves, bestseller lists, and The New York Times Book Review, which called it both “brilliant” and “preposterous.”

Firestone would not publish again for 28 years. When she did—after her expulsion from the feminist movement she’d provoked and inspired into existence, and decades of repeated institutionalizations—it was Airless Spaces. Reissued by Semiotext(e) this year, her second and final book is usually read as autobiographical fiction, which it is: a tracing of Firestone’s time inside mental hospitals and the half-life she attempted to live outside of them (the scene with Valerie, for instance). Literary critics and academics alike have mourned the dearth of explicit feminism in this text: Kathi Weeks argues that, while Dialectic encapsulates “the demystificatory potential of ideological critique, Airless Spaces reads more like a treasury of signs and wonders that the author strains to wrestle into order and meaning.” True, the book is opalescent, shifty. But I’d argue these strange stories—or perhaps I’d better call them portraits, scratched negatives, elegies, vignettes embezzled from reality—might be less a collage of inscrutable signs than an encrypted map, more a message in code than a disorganized evidence file.

Fair warning: I might be overreading out of my own desire not to believe that Firestone’s story is “an anti-feminist cautionary tale, an object lesson in how feminist politics can estrange a woman from society and render her incapable of functioning within it,” or an answer to the question of “whether there is any difference between madness and being the only sane person in a sick world,” as Moira Donegan put it in a New Yorker review of the reissued edition. Donegan’s analyses are plausible and perhaps correct, but buying into them feels, frankly, like paying my way into a hospital room of my own.

Let’s try this. Read through rather than against Dialectic, Airless Spaces can be understood as a conversion story told with tragic irony, a cunningly devastating depiction of the literal imposition of her original feminist polemic’s most inventive, unorthodox, and revolutionary theories of misogyny’s functioning on Firestone herself—proof her points weren’t “preposterous” but prescient. As ever, the political is personal.

Simone de Beauvoir, whom Dialectic is dedicated to, famously wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Becca Rothfeld observes a parallel process occurring in Airless Spaces in which “one is not born, but rather becomes, a patient.” It is essential to look closely at those processes, because when we do, we might see that the grinding methods through which that transformation is enacted are strikingly similar to Dialectic’s most daring historical interventions: Firestone’s arguments around the invention of childhood and Freudian clinical practice as tools of misogynistic oppression. Instead, Airless Spaces is usually positioned against Dialectic, which is framed as outward-focused, action-oriented, systems-based, affectively volatile, and driven by Firestone’s personality and impassioned politics. By contrast, Airless Spaces is cast as a narrative of enclosure, a time-limited, impersonal archive of distorting institutions, mental illness, and a society sickening the people it incarcerates.

It is true that Airless Spaces is closer to a diary than a polemic or a war plan, that Firestone’s politics surface explicitly only in minor swells. It is certainly possible to read this book as resigned or fatalistic in its quietude—as a sparse, utilitarian record of mental illness that also proves the persistence of an artistic and journalistic impulse. The mouth that once spit fire might swallow pills on schedule, but it will still speak, albeit with the volume turned down. But I think there are other ways to read this ominous, opaque text, translations that trust Firestone retained more of her inner trickster and slick theorist than the reviews-as-requiems give her credit for. Firestone inscribed a copy of Dialectic to her sister by birth with the words “To Laya, the only true sister, after all.” Airless Spaces doesn’t desert sisterhood so much as loosen its bonds, find its fellow travelers in stranger settings. “For Lourdes Cintron,” reads its dedication, “as promised in the hospital.”

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Shulamith Firestone moved to New York in the mid-1960s to pursue the career in figurative painting she’d embarked on in Chicago, where she’d studied at the School of the Art Institute and begun organizing early feminist groups. As convivial as she was convicted, she was a born organizer, co-founding the first radical feminist groups in the city at just 22—the New York Radical Women, followed by the Redstockings and the New York Radical Feminists. Led by Firestone and her comrades, these groups put on the first abortion speak-out along with a series of wrathfully funny protest actions, including an “ogle-in” on Wall Street and the release of mice at a bridal fair.

In writing as in organizing, Firestone is congenial even when she’s enraged, aware that she’ll have to be cunning to get her radical points across digestibly—which is not to say that she cares if you like how it tastes, but to say that it won’t be bland, nor will it be written in an academic style requiring too much mastication. Though “she does not deign to address her skeptics, let alone meet them halfway,” as Weeks puts it, she does show them a good time: Dialectic is a thrill ride, and advertised as such (the cover of the 1970s Bantam paperback edition teased that “Chapter 6 Might Change Your Life”).

The book admitted that Marx, Engels, and Freud had been on the right track, but it fervently argued that they had simply not zoomed out enough, nor taken their revolutionary suggestions to their logical conclusion: Firestone contended that women’s biological capacity for pregnancy, and the nuclear family that demands she be defined by it, comprises a cultural distinction that runs deeper than class. This fact, she contended, Marx and Engels had failed or refused to notice, in turn dooming their—by Firestone’s lights, otherwise pretty fabulous—visions, and one that meant “the first successful revolution in history” would have to be feminist, inclusive of but not limited to socialism “to truly eradicate all class systems.” The nuclear family, she urges, must be destroyed—and to that end, she throws out, in Weeks’s words, “deliberately ‘sketchy’” solutions (which have since been taken without the grain of salt she explicitly requested and used to demonize her as deranged or silly). She envisions postfamilial cyber communism, a society oriented around artificial wombs and communal living. Until the sex distinction “no longer matter[s] culturally”—as Marx and Engels argued class distinctions no longer would in the wake of proletarian revolution—“the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.”

Firestone argued that society does not just violently subdue women’s autonomy, originality, and authenticity; it also sucks the eros, spontaneity, and—let’s be honest, because she always was—fun out of life itself. The values we’ve deemed “natural” are not necessarily human. The demands of the nuclear family (which, writing in the late sixties, she reveals to be a relatively recent construction) shunt people into domestic and capitalist roles with predetermined plotlines, inspiring stultifying performances, inducing spiritual blindness, and obstructing love, which Firestone wanted to see “flow unimpeded.” She hoped “to restore th[e] world to its emotions, and literally to its senses.” Her plan of attack was as absurd as it was precise, pithy, daringly bizarre, and at moments drastically problematic—a fever dream translated into a map replete with diagrams and timelines starting in the Paleolithic period.

Avidly systematizing, tantalizingly tendentious, and utterly hilarious, Dialectic’s proudly paranoid orientation evinces the tender naivete of the (allegedly) mad. Their work runs on a conviction that if they could just make you listen, then you’d join their crusade. Firestone retained that optimism, even as she knew not everyone could survive the knowledge, or stomach its consequences: “Many women give up in despair,” she wrote, noting that “if that’s how deep it goes they don’t want to know. Others,” she allowed, “continue strengthening and enlarging the movement, their painful sensitivity to female oppression existing for a purpose: eventually to eliminate it.” Firestone herself was one of those brave enough to get vulnerable and vitriolic. Yet permeability predicts a wound: in most conflicts with world-historical stakes, someone has to bleed out for their beliefs.

For weeks, I couldn’t start writing this, because I was terrified—of what happened to Shulie when she stared straight at her society, let the bags under her eyes deepen, and described what she saw. When, in Dialectic, she told us how we could live instead, we incarcerated, drugged, and demonized her. Still, that’s the thing about demons—they’re famously tough to kill. Firestone’s original demon text went underground, subsisting on scraps and the carcasses of the babies we threw out with second-wave feminism’s bloodied bathwater. With Dialectic out of print for years, the book’s spirit might have wended its way into Airless Spaces.

I use religious language because Firestone was a saint of sorts, because her onetime feminist peers refer to her like a mystic or a martyr: an “unidentified comet,” a “fireball,” a “firebrand,” a “shooting star,” the founder of a movement that “burned her alive.” She was the myopically optimistic yeshiva escapee, the avowedly foolhardy girl in glasses who, as Weeks put it, “lit the spark and took the heat.” (Maybe, after all that talk about burning bushes, she thought she could contain the flames.) Today, we joke about women’s liberation and bra burning, yet forget to memorialize the women sacrificed at the altar of feminist purity. Radical feminism’s trial by fire left scores of early feminists “to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion,” “vanished into asylums” or left to “despairs that could only end in death,” as Firestone’s comrade (in feminism, writing, and institutionalization) Kate Millett notes. Feminists who wanted to replace the family ended up fighting like Cain and Abel. “Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters,” Ti-Grace Atkinson famously mourned after the demise of so many feminist groups—not to mention feminists themselves. In 2012, concerned neighbors heard Firestone chanting Hebrew prayers at the top of her lungs. A few months later, she, too, would be found dead in the dog days of summer, possibly of starvation.

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When Dialectic is remembered at all, it is for its more ridiculous zingers (misremembered because, mis-genred, the polemic metabolizes rage through prose play): the suggestion that women should engage in a “smile boycott” or the description of pregnancy as “shitting a pumpkin.” Firestone made a radical argument not against children but against childhood, which is “hell” not because children are devils—in fact, she considers children’s true nature akin to that of “tiny adults,” respects their clarified perspective and optimistic gullibility—but because childhood has been stripped of its unique intelligence, its precocious originality, in service of cultivating docility and reinforcing set roles within the nuclear family.

According to the book’s reading of history, Freudianism and the suffragette era of feminism emerged simultaneously in response to the emotionally violent repression required by the rise of the nuclear family and its constrictive gender and labor roles. Both, writes Firestone, “came as reactions to one of the smuggest periods in Western civilization, the Victorian Era, characterized by its family-centredness, and thus its exaggerated sexual oppression and repression.” Firestone sees Freud as “a diagnostician for what feminism purports to cure.” His desire to assimilate his radical theories to the existing power structure led him to develop a willful blind spot.

As Freudianism evolved from an analytical framework into a clinical practice, it sacrificed its macrocosmic insights for microscopic projects of adjustment. (Freud’s “genius was poetic rather than scientific; his ideas are more valuable as metaphors than as literal truths,” Firestone writes, with the winking knowledge that the same is true of the very book she herself is writing, which she describes as “meant to stimulate thinking in fresh areas rather than to dictate the action.”) The 20th-century establishment embraced Freudianism: it was “the perfect foil for feminism, because, though it struck the same nerve, it had a safety catch that feminism didn’t—it never questioned the given reality.” Instead, it renarrativizes individual storylines that can play out on the same old stage, writing plots people can survive. By recategorizing a woman’s dissatisfaction with her role in the family as a curable pathology, “psychology departments became half-way houses to send women scurrying back ‘adjusted’ to their traditional roles.” Where Freudianism promised ordinary unhappiness, feminism flirted with the radically unknown: seeking to dismantle the stage and build an entirely new set, not to mention expand the repertoire of characters.

Always interested in the ways broad strokes draw individual blood, Firestone starts her story in the Middle Ages, when children were treated like adults and “the family” was not the center of social or economic life. Drawing on Philippe Ariès’s social history of childhood, she contends that sociality was historically characterized by “large numbers of people in a constant state of flux”—an organizational structure not dissimilar to the radical feminist groups of the 1960s, or the communal living experiments Firestone envisioned for the postrevolutionary future. Only with the “development of the bourgeoisie” was “the concept of childhood developed as an adjunct to the modern family,” the nuclear family reframed as the fiscal, social, and emotional focal point of a life—a structure in which the child and mother are encouraged to compete for the patriarch’s approval, rather than form a potentially revolutionary “alliance of the oppressed.”

Designed to keep the child “economically dependent for longer and longer periods of time,” to entrench the nuclear family as the basic unit of capitalism, this process had only been exacerbated and intensified in her time and our own. The omnipresence and dominance of standardized education, a regime of institutions that categorizes, disciplines, and, most importantly, separates children from adults, trains children to be incompetent, helpless. As with the “myth of femininity,” children’s “physical difference had been enlarged culturally with the help of special dress, education, manners, and activity, until this cultural reinforcement itself began to appear ‘natural,’” a condition she always stresses is not inherently “human.” What is human might be foolhardy, but it is freely chosen. What Firestone calls “childrenese”—baby talk—used to communicate with children (and girlfriends, she points out), at first seems a harmless, even sweet, affectation. Yet it conditions children to believe they can’t follow adult speech without conscious training—training, of course, conducted in the language of the oppressor. Where children once learned through play and apprenticeship, in school “learning motivation” became no longer an internally directed knowledge-seeking but an “approval conscious” process, “a sure killer of originality.”

Just as institutionalized education transforms individuals into “children,” so too does institutionalized mental healthcare mold individuals into similarly helpless, underestimated, homogenized “patients” in Airless Spaces. Firestone’s characters undergo strikingly similar desubjectification processes to the youth-targeting ones described in Dialectic. Forced into hospital uniforms, they grieve their aesthetic freedom and find themselves permanently legible as mental patients (“when she got out of the hospital,” writes Firestone of one woman, “she looked like an escapee from a loony bin”). Required to learn an inscrutable code, they reenter a society that resembles Babel, their confusion rendering them all too recognizable as patients. “[T]horoughly programmed by the rigid hospital routine,” Firestone’s character is “unable to make the smallest decision, speechless.”

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Under “constant supervision[,] all earlier independence was abolished.” The line is from Dialectic but could just as easily have come from Airless Spaces, where “there was no such freedom of hours,” where patients are forced into “embarrassing juvenile quasi-activity.” In Dialectic, Firestone cites the 1612 Regulations for Boarders at Port-Royal, which explicitly directs educators to create institutions “calculated to make them think one loves them, […] make them love their supervision rather than fear it.” In Airless Spaces, one institutionalized woman catches just such a con in action. After glimpsing a report her therapist wrote on her, she is overcome with distress: “She had thought, somehow, that her shrink loved her. […] Now where did she get that idea?”

In Dialectic, “the class basis of childhood is exposed” and children are revealed as an oppressed group akin to women, which means that a feminist revolution must be inclusive of not only socialism but also child liberation or be as doomed to failure as the Marxist revolution Firestone indicts as myopic. For her part, de Beauvoir thought Dialectic—specifically its argument that child liberation was intertwined with women’s liberation—was one of the few “original” ideas to come out of radical feminism.

Just as “most children aren’t fools” and “don’t plan to be stuck with the lousy limited lives of women,” many women are not fools and don’t plan to be stuck with those limited lives either. While children are scared straight by schools, women in Airless Spaces’ stories are forced to come to the same conclusions through mental institutions—integrally, though, these are systems, like childhood, that also oppress men. Educational and therapeutic institutions perform collusive processes of desubjectification, vacuum-sealing individuals into the airless space of child or patient, and obstructing the passage of love outside of the channels of the nuclear family. Perhaps, then, Airless Spaces pulls off an immaculate conception: a figure of any gender subject to such emotional and intellectual oppression might desire escape, might need love direly enough to inspire a whole new religion, one in which love is not supervisory, disciplinary, and coercive but respectful, attentive, and inquisitive. I can’t help but read this book—written by a woman who, in the words of one of her fellow former organizers, never showed up to a meeting without a plan—as a faded blueprint.

If Firestone’s first book was an attempt to metaphorically bomb the clogged and cracked pipelines that constrict love’s flow, her second book’s “biggest trouble” is that “love was forgotten” entirely, rendered unreachable like “joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago.” Women who participated in Firestone’s early feminist groups, such as activist Pam Allen, described the experience as “a kind of ‘falling in love’”—evidence that the novel, curved kinds of love that Firestone envisioned were not impossible, only rarely undertaken.

By the time Dialectic was published in 1970, Firestone had left the groups she founded, the ones that allowed for these affective experiments, after accusations of “dominating” behavior and “‘hoarding’ attention”—allegations of masculine deportment evincing a melancholically ironic misunderstanding of Firestone’s feminism, which demanded “not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.” After her rejection by those women and degradation by institutions, she seemed to abandon belief in the achievability of even a portion of her ideals—which is, crucially, different from believing they are not worthwhile.

More than 20 years after a young Firestone penned Dialectic, the production of Airless Spaces was made possible by a support group of women, organized by a Visiting Nurse Service of New York caseworker who had become a fan of Firestone’s as a young organizer herself. She convinced the organization to take Firestone on as a client despite her lack of health insurance, and coordinated a group of Firestone’s admirers, who visited her regularly, helped her remain stable, and encouraged her to write. When the group fell apart after the book’s publication, Firestone was institutionalized again. Later, back on the outside, she isolated herself, refusing to take visits even from the woman she’d once called her only true sister.

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A girl refuses to wash her hair, so she is violently sedated and forcibly given a bowl cut. The trim enacts a transformation. Once an “attractive woman who just happened to be thrown into a mental hospital,” she is now legible, permanently, as a “mental patient.” An older woman, a misfit with a mustache, complains about her terrible boredom, the lack of reading materials on the ward, the idiocy implied by the activities her therapists suggest she engage in. A younger one finds the older one frightening, thinks to herself: “There but for the grace of God indeed.” They both have sisters on the outside, but only the younger one’s is still taking her calls. Another woman metamorphoses into an insomniac. A girl is dragged in by the police in the summer heat; yet another, described as gorgeous and disliked, ended up here as a result of homelessness.

A fight breaks out over a portion of banana at breakfast, and one of the girls involved sculpts the incident into a paranoid theory about the hospital authorities. Someone survives by devising a systematic form of pacing. Fainting spells offer “black-velvety” relief; “bedtime is the best time of day.” Between crying jags, an anorexic holds court, glowing, a winner—she figured out the rules of the game, and is about to be discharged. The wide world beckons, only to rebuke. For in the “loveless hospital,” people are transfigured from individual adults into infantilized patients, trained in institutional gamesmanship that doesn’t translate outside, where society is governed in a language they no longer speak.

These are some of the women who populate the first section of Airless Spaces. Some of those women are the author, others are fellow patients, and others are somewhere in between—avatars for Firestone that might be disguises of nomenclature, a Freudian slip from first to third person, but might also be the detritus of almost-friendship, a mimetic melding with a sister prisoner. Uniforms, hospital-speak, drugs, and infantilizing activities (always put in sarcastic scare quotes) desubjectify, forging fresh off the assembly line patients in the static nondrama of the hospital, the setting and title of the first portion of the book. The following sections are called “Post-Hospital,” “Losers,” “Obits,” and “Suicides I Have Known.” I read “Losers” less as derogatory than descriptive—these are people set up to fail, and then treated as though their failure is proof of innate incompetence and illness, rather than indoctrination into an infantilizing, “loveless” system. “Losers” follows Firestone and her fellow former patients as they flail and limp through a city as callous as the ward was, its mundane cruelties made more unmanageable by the hospital’s tragically effective process of depersonalization. These are stark stills of suffering, a series of missed connections to people, vocations, and interests that our characters can no longer catch in shaky or stiffened hands (all those drugs, for one thing). The posthospital “paralysis was stubborn and lingered for years.” One of Firestone’s avatars finds herself “in despair that she no longer was able to shop,” let alone read, write, or watch movies—“the old excitement of creation did not return, or if it did, it fizzled by morning after her nightly medication. […] Instead she reverted to hospital behavior: long hours of blanking out.”

Donegan writes that, “by illness and by institutions,” these characters “have been deprived of agency. And where there is no agency there can be no plot.” Yet these figures retain autonomy and individuality through tics, outbursts, tears—expressions of pain Firestone records as proof of the spirit’s persistence. Not to mention their valiant bids for connection, experiments in conversation under conditions of crisis. The people trapped in the title’s “airless spaces” manage whispered dialogue despite the denial of oxygen. Many of the book’s 51 sparse chapters are elegies for people Firestone did not always quite love, but knew. Here, to know someone is to observe their pain with curiosity and quiet attention.

Ellen Willis—a friend and co-organizer of Firestone’s—once called her own “deepest impulses […] optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.” So call me crazy, call me overly sensitive, call me whatever they called Shulie, but rather than spending my time mourning, allow me to read this book like a spy or a satirist, a feminist willing to make some bold calls, even if that means making a few mistakes. Perhaps this text’s placidity, its deadpan depiction of despair, belies its theoretical pointedness. After all, a blunt object can kill as easily as a blade.

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In one Airless story, a character is asked by a former doctor if she is happy or content. She calls herself “lucid” and “stabilized” yet, she wonders, “at what price”? She is alive, “but her life was ruined.” When Firestone receives the news of acquaintances’ deaths, “she often wishe[s] she could trade places with that person—let someone who knew how to organize and enjoy life benefit from her bodily health better than she could!” The sentiment is as haunting as it is generous, sanguine in its belief that love lingers in certain corners.

Sianne Ngai has astutely observed that the stories’ “airlessness” lies in their depiction of the “lack of a communicating channel” between people in pain. But Firestone is perhaps attempting to build such a channel out of the makeshift tools she finds in writing. Discharged, her narrator tries to find former friends and patient-peers. They rebuff her, brought down by their own incapacity to cope, or are else uncontactable, lost to Rolodexes trashed in a fit of mania. The book has been called “dark,” “heartbreaking,” and “mordant,” but it has spells of, if not hope, happiness in a minor key: the fleeting thrill of finding a coconspirator, the quiet grace of habits. The paranoiac’s muffled optimism remains, specifically in Firestone’s resilient faith in relationality. She listens to a friend play the saxophone, the music like “silver prayers.” She runs into a man she once knew from parties and the drug deals done in their hallways, and urges him, earnestly, to “take care.” (“In the old days,” she muses, she would have told him to “take it easy.”)

Elsewhere, a man and a woman are out of the institution and in the lurch, each staying at a Y. The two of them are separated by a span of crosstown blocks, locked in their own downward spirals, crash-outs looming. The streets start to take on an artificial sparkle, offering drugs, a few dollars, a loose cigarette, or, if they’re really lucky, a soft place to sleep, a bar with other people in it. Both characters close this vignette alone, but Firestone places their stories side by side, back-to-back in a single chapter, as if attempting to force eye contact, connect kindred spirits—or at least allow them to touch.

The book’s final two sections, “Obits” and “Suicides I Have Known,” are strangely sprightly despite the weight of grief, pages offering glimpses of Dialectic’s madcap sentimentality, if subdued. Firestone emerges as overtly Shulamith, the mask of fiction removed, for the first time in some of these scenes. She only renders herself legible as an individual with a specific history when relaying stories about people she has lost, people who knew her before the hospital years. It is in relation to others that Firestone has always wanted to be seen; in the act of preserving the memory of another’s individuality, her own emerges.

The characters who earn these out-of-tune elegies embody the alarming, alluring qualities Firestone spent her life seeking: originality, a penchant for missteps and pratfalls, a provocative impulse. They are not wives, husbands, daughters, sons, patients, and clinicians—or, they are not only those things. They are ex-lovers turned questionable acquaintances, resentfully respectful frenemies, gloriously well-intentioned hustlers, former coconspirators, friendly dope fiends, forthright photographers, tortured devotees of causes from feminism to macrobiotic food, wannabe artists, condescending crushes. Death throws their refusal of the roles on offer into harsh relief, and the consequences society delivers to dissidents, even those it can’t call crazy, come to the fore.

For example: The last section is the final resting place of a girl Firestone befriended and lost to suicide in college. The girl who jumped was a mediocre painter and a chatterbox; in the wake of her death, Firestone fears that their conversations drove her to the water. An academic, a man she should have “had a deep affair with,” left a suicide note including the line “I die with a smile on my lips,” and Firestone couldn’t “dismiss the association with a joke in [her] book, urging women to a ‘smile boycott.’” Mourning an almost-love, she sees her creativity and verve clearly in the recollections of another.

These kinds of visions can drive you insane or charismatically zany, turn a voracious flirt into a bizarre cartographer and surrealist mathematician. Back when she was still engaged in feminist organizing, Firestone wrote that “when love takes place in a power context, everyone’s ‘love life’ must be affected.” She maintained this belief in equality even in heartbreak and loneliness, conditions that drive many a feminist to competitive misogyny. A former fellow member of a feminist group, Alix Kates Shulman, recalls a meeting in which a then-single Firestone fixed “her piercing eyes on me, pointed her finger, and said, ‘You have two men and I have none. It’s unfair.’” Even in her frustration and isolation, however, she was directing her ire not at her friend but at the system. As Shulman explains, “she was addressing the question of scarcity, and pointing out that just as there was no justice in the conduct of sexual relations, there was none in its distribution.” Put plainly, she was trying to solve a violently absurd equation. Still, she retained faith in the pleasure of flirting with such mathematical chaos; another friend, Rosalyn Baxandall, remembers a group of radical feminists attempting to plan a party, explaining that “Shulie and I were the only ones who voted for having men [attend]. We thought it would be more fun.”

After all, as Firestone wrote in Dialectic, “it is unrealistic to impose theories of what ought to be on a psyche already fundamentally organized around specific emotional needs,” so we should “concentrate on overthrowing the institutions that have produced this psychical organization.” She always knew that while the misogynistic family structure she condemned limited women’s freedom, it also offered safety in a dangerous world. By the time she wrote Airless Spaces, she understood that setting sail for somewhere new risks shipwreck, and wondered what it might have been like to spend her years at sea on dry land, sleeping next to someone.

Of course, even leaky life rafts appeal to someone drowning. Out of the hospital, Firestone yearns for the era before “the moment of pickup had passed.” The verb tense here is worth grieving—once a paradigmatic agent, escaping her orthodox family, fostering multiple romantic relationships, writing a polemic, and organizing other women, a woman who wanted to invent a lateral heterosexuality, she now longs for a passivity perhaps taught in the hospital. In a cell, you want someone to show up with a key, never mind if there’s another one in their pocket—who knows what kind of room it will unlock, and how well it might be furnished.

In the hospital, Firestone’s character sneaks into a male patient’s room and obsessively watches him sleep. He is “heavy, a husband figure. I could just imagine waking up to that sleeping bulk day after day,” writes a woman who once swore never to marry. Rayne Fisher-Quann has observed that “it is insulting, undignified, to accept the warmth of the object that exists primarily to hurt you—but sometimes, when it gets cold enough, you start to think that it would be stupid to suffer twice.” Firestone was many things, but she was not stupid, nor did she think other women were. If anything, she thought they were too clear-eyed, choosing to avert their gazes from the fire and simply bask in the available warmth.

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Firestone never condescended to women who wanted to be wives. After all, she joked, “a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo.” Wisecracks and wordplay abound in Dialectic; “I will never forget how her chapter on love (as an illness) made me laugh out loud with relief,” remembers the feminist writer Phyllis Chesler. Reading now, I wonder whether laughter can’t inject some much-needed oxygen into an airless space.

“[T]he dominant affects fueling and circulating around feminist theory [today] are decidedly more muted,” Weeks writes, suggesting that today’s feminism might be an airless space itself. “The critical affect of anger has been replaced by a comparatively tame skepticism, and one of Firestone’s most important critical modalities, sarcasm, has been replaced in these post-foundationalist times by irony.” Cynicism circulates in oxygen-deprived environments. When survival seems precarious, playing both sides can serve as a defense mechanism, as we see occurring in today’s ostensibly leftist postfeminisms, from BimboTok to Red Scare pre-right-wing conversion. Firestone’s jokes were sharpened, used as weapons or tools rather than armor. When Dialectic came out, her father, who had once threatened to kill her, apparently refused to read it, calling it “the joke book of the century”—funnily enough, he didn’t realize that was exactly what she intended to write.

Alternately dissociative and plaintive, many of Airless Spaces’ later scenes are shot through with sly quips, a wily gallows humor. Firestone is the rare seer who recognizes that a funeral is ultimately a party. Her sight drove her to the sidewalk, and to raving at strangers, but it didn’t kill her sense of humor—in her unpublished roman à clef about her time panhandling, she wrote that her poverty and paranoia around food poisoning left her looking “like something out of Dostoevsky (which actually helped her beggar’s earnings).” Together, her books can be read as an exploration of what Andrea Long Chu has called “the dark comedy of the desire we call feminism,” the fact that “we are ethically compelled not only never to get what we want but never to stop wanting it, either,” which “fucking sucks.” Airless Spaces reflects an acute awareness of this reality. Rather than abandon her feminism, she chose to render it in a form akin to the one she first fell in love with, painting a portrait of her society with grim realism and elegiac care, attending to the minute with reverential, literary attention instead of attempting a legal indictment.

“I most fondly remember Shulamith Firestone as never a ‘patient’ woman,” Ti-Grace Atkinson wrote after her death. Firestone’s transformation from impatient revolutionary into literal patient is a cautionary tale, a tragedy, a martyring, and, most of all, a message. Virginia Woolf wrote that her own essays were “more to the point & less composed” than her fiction. Airless Spaces is exactly that, an unmapped minefield riddled with revelations as explosive as those set off by Dialectic. It opens with the recollection of a dream: Firestone is on a sinking luxury liner, searching for shelter as oblivious partiers get more and more debauched. In the keel, she finds a refrigerator, an airless enclosure she hopes to hide in until rescue comes. For those of us still trapped, there might be a chance to save each other yet. We just need a little breathing room.

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Featured image: Still from Shulie, 1967. Directed by Jerome Blumenthal, Sheppard Ferguson, James Leahy, and Alan Rettig.