Originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five year
s old, and going on to become a bestseller, The Dialectic of Sex was the first b
ook of the women's liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politic
s. Beginning with a look at the radical and grassroots history of the first wave
(with its foundation in the abolition movement of the time), Firestone document
s its major victory, the granting of the vote to women in 1920, and the fifty ye
ars of ridicule that followed. She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freu
d, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolu
tion.
