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Shulamith Firestone

Article in Information Communication and Society · March 2004

DOI: 10.1080/1369118042000208933

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Debora Halbert

SHULAMITH FIRESTONE
Radical feminism and visions of the
information society

Shulamith Firestone was a foundational second-wave feminist thinker. Firestone’s

radical feminism argued for a future where technology was used to eliminate sexism
by freeing women from childbirth and liberating both men and women from the
patriarchal nuclear family. In many important ways, Firestone’s work is the
precursor for contemporary cyberfeminist writing, especially the work of Donna
Haraway. This paper examines Shulamith Firestone and her contribution to the
information age.

Keywords Shulamith Firestone; radical feminism; cyberfeminism;

technology; liberation

Feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most
basic structures of our society.
(Shulamith Firestone 1970)
Although both are bound in a spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg
than a goddess.
(Donna Haraway 1990)

Second-wave feminists, through their critique of traditional gender roles, were

instrumental in illuminating the negative impact of male domination on
women’s lives. As a result of their efforts over the past few decades, many
women, especially in the USA, have been able to take enormous strides in
education and employment. Young women growing up with the benefits of the
women’s liberation movement have been spared much of the overt discrimina-
tion their mothers experienced, and hence many believe that women’s libera-
tion is virtually complete. However, despite the successes of the feminist
movement, issues ripe for feminist analysis continue to exist.
As we move further into what has been called the information age, the
underlying currents of sexism that second-wave feminists denounced remain

Information, Communication & Society Vol. 7, No. 1, March 2004, pp. 115–135
ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1369118042000208933
116 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

strong. While the picture has become more complex since the 1970s, a system-
atic gender critique of society remains necessary. The gains women, at least
white middle-class women, have made make it harder to critique male domina-
tion than it was thirty years ago, but it still is important to do so. The picture
is also complex because feminist scholarship has become so diverse. There is
no single feminist standpoint on such important topics as the role of women
in an information society and the impact of technology on women. The com-
plexity and diversity of feminist scholarship often makes it difficult to determine
not only what the problems in an information age might be, but also how they
might be solved.
The information age raises questions concerning gender in the context of
computer networks and communication technology, but the questions feminists
must answer in the information age are similar to the ones feminists were
answering during the second wave feminist movement. Primarily, how is it
possible to create a society where women are treated equally to men?1 Visions
of utopian and non-sexist futures were popular during the construction of the
modern feminist movement, but these utopias have not come to pass. The
desire for gender equality continues to influence feminist writing in the
information age. As computers and technology become increasingly important
for functioning in the modern world, issues such as control over reproductive
technologies, access to cyberspace, the construction of a male-dominated tech-
nological sphere, and the need for women to claim the Internet as an important
space of their own have emerged. Underlying these issues remains the larger
problem of how it might be possible to eliminate a system of domination that
perpetuates gender inequality.
Modern information technology tends to be Janus-like. Information tech-
nology provides women with new possibilities and access to networks of power
while at the same time creating a space that perpetuates the same discrimination
experienced by women in the past (Spender 1996). While some feminists see
the Internet as allowing women to play with gendered identities, more radical
feminists suggest that information technology, and the postmodern feminist
interpretations of its libratory potential, reproduce sexism instead of tran-
scending it (Klein 1996, pp. 346–358). Despite claims that the information
age would help liberate women by creating cyberspaces where gender was no
longer an important social construction, misogyny is alive and well on the
Internet (Spender 1996, pp. 193–227).
Questioning the role technology should play in women’s lives is not a
new feminist theme. Shulamith Firestone (1970) raised questions regarding
technology in her groundbreaking radical feminist text The Dialectics of Sex.
Considered one of the twenty most influential women’s books of the past
twenty years (‘A different ‘‘sex’’ is back’ 1992), Firestone sought to develop
in The Dialectics of Sex a feminist future, using technology to free women from
the bondage created by childbirth and the patriarchal family structure. Firestone
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 117

wrote her major work when the information society was in its earliest stages,
yet she was able to point to many of the technological innovations of the late
1960s as evidence that one day technology could liberate people from labour
and women from childbirth. While her ideas about restructuring the family
continue to sound radical today, feminist thinkers in the information age would
do well to return to Firestone for a more thorough understanding of why
contemporary information technology seems not to have achieved the type of
gender equity early feminists sought. In this paper, I examine the work of
Shulamith Firestone and her contribution to an analysis of the information age.

Firestone reconsidered

Shulamith Firestone became involved in many of the 1960s new left movements
and began working to develop a women’s movement in Chicago before moving
to New York (Gamer 1999). In New York, she was instrumental in the
formation of the women’s liberation movement, where she helped organize
the New York Radical Women, with Pam Allen, and later co-founded the
radical feminist organization the New York Redstockings, with Ellen Willis
(Humm 1992; Gamer 1999). Firestone was considered ‘intense and brilliant’,
but difficult to get along with (Gamer 1999; Jay 1999, p. 36). In addition to
direct political action, Firestone helped define the early feminist movement
through her writings. She edited the radical feminist journal Notes,2 where she
published ‘The women’s rights movement in the US: a new view’ in 1968. In
this essay, she argued that the new women’s rights movement had revolutionary
potential based upon a re-reading of the early women’s rights movement as
radical (Firestone 1968). This essay was incorporated into The Dialectics of Sex,
published two years later when Firestone was only twenty-five years old.
Ironically, Firestone had left the women’s movement by the time The
Dialectics of Sex was published, owing to personality conflicts and claims of
elitism and domination in the movement (Echols 1989, p. 195). Despite her
absence from the political scene, many considered The Dialectics of Sex to be
one of the most important works of the second-wave feminist movement. Since
its publication, excerpts have been reproduced in numerous edited volumes on
feminist theory. Notwithstanding this important position in the feminist litera-
ture, Firestone’s work, and that of most of the early radical feminists, is largely
overlooked as biologically essentialist and out of date (Richardson 1996). She
is read as important to the historical evolution of the women’s movement with
little or no contemporary relevance.
Firestone began, but never finished, a second book on images of women
in advertising (Jay 1999, p. 120). She has since written a collection of short
essays dealing with mental illness and the impact of institutionalization (Fire-
stone 1998), drawn in part from her own experiences with institutionalization.
118 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

Firestone has not remained connected to the evolving discipline of feminist

theory. Until recently, The Dialectics of Sex was out of print. Despite the
importance of the book for the creation and evolution of second-wave femin-
ism, it has been virtually ignored for decades. Thanks to the work of several
young feminists concerned about the loss of historical memory in the women’s
movement, it has recently been reissued (Baumgardner & Richards 2000).
Like many contemporary feminists, I had read selections from Firestone’s
work, but never the entire text. I had heard the criticisms of Firestone’s work,
but never put these criticisms to the test myself. Thus, reading The Dialectics
of Sex within the context of thinking about the information age was very
revealing. In light of the insights Firestone can still provide for feminist theory
within the information age, it is time to reappraise her work.

The Dialectics of Sex revisited

Firestone (1970, p. 3) begins her classic work with the claim, ‘Sex class is so
deep as to be invisible.’ This sex-class division is premised upon the biological
differences between men and women that have long been considered ‘natural’.
The radical feminist project described by Firestone was designed to challenge
and destroy categories of biological difference by initially accepting the exis-
tence of biological difference and then arguing for its elimination through
technology. As Fraser & Nicholson (1990, p. 27) point out,
Firestone drew on the pervasive tendency within modern culture to locate
the roots of gender differences in biology. Her coup was to use biologism
to establish the primacy of the struggle against male domination rather
than to justify acquiescence to it.
Firestone wished to challenge biological ‘truisms’ in an attempt to change
them.
It is this initial claim regarding the biological basis of sexism that causes
contemporary feminists to criticize Firestone as ‘essentialist and monocausal’
because she ignores the historicity of gender relationships and reduces relation-
ships to biology (Fraser & Nicholson 1990, pp. 27–28; Grant 1993, p. 25).
However, Firestone’s construction of the problem is more complex than the
critique suggests. Her project challenges the definition of what is natural
(Firestone 1970, p. 4). Firestone’s project is deconstructive; she wants to break
through the language that cements women’s roles in their biology, not repro-
duce these roles. Firestone acknowledges biological differences between men
and women as well as the existence of the biological family (man, woman,
infant), but she is unwilling to accept this framework as anything other than a
starting point. In other words, it is time humans evolved beyond their biological
conditions.
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 119

Firestone’s recognition that biological differences exist, but can be tran-

scended, is substantively different from feminists who identify ‘women’s’ char-
acteristics that have been marginalized in a male-dominated society –
motherhood, for example – and uses them to privilege the female experience
as a superior experience. Firestone accepts what she considers to be certain
biological facts – women’s menstruation, childbirth, the fact that human infants
take longer than other animals to become independent, that there has been
an interdependency between mothers and children across cultures, and that
reproductive differences led to divisions of labour (Firestone 1970, p. 9) – as
the basis from which to theorize. However, Firestone argues that one cannot
discuss biological facts without understanding the flexibility of human nature
and the fact that ‘the kingdom of nature does not reign absolute’ (Firestone
1970, p. 10).
Unlike feminist theorists who locate the argument for a feminist future in
women’s ‘natural’ characteristics, specifically their ability to give birth and
mother, Firestone transcends the natural and envisions a new relationship
between men and women. She argues:

The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist
movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction
itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter
culturally. . .. The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit
of both would be replaced by (at least the option of ) artificial reproduction:
children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either,
however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the
mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence
on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to
adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The divi-
sion of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether
(through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be
broken.
(Firestone 1970, p. 11)

There is no intrinsic reason why women (or men) must remain slaves to
biology. In fact, the links between biology and technology are at the heart of
contemporary cyberfeminism, to which Firestone seems to be a crucial pre-
cursor. However, it had only recently become possible to challenge biological
truths, as modern technology became more sophisticated (Firestone 1970,
p. 3).
Technology can be used to move beyond the ‘natural’. Writing before
widespread access to birth control and Roe v. Wade (1973), Firestone argued
that an important task for the women’s liberation movement was to seize
control of technological innovation, especially reproduction technologies and
120 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

use them to liberate women (Firestone 1970, p. 11). It should be the goal of
the feminist movement to concentrate ‘their full energies on demands for
control of scientific discoveries by and for the people. For, like atomic energy,
fertility control, artificial reproduction, cybernation, in themselves, are liberat-
ing – unless they are improperly used’ (Firestone 1970, p.179).
Firestone covers a lot of ground in The Dialectics of Sex. She describes the
radical nature of the first American women’s movement and the backlash
against the modest gains they achieved. She deconstructs Freud and offers a
compelling feminist critique of Freud’s ideas regarding women and family
relationships. She builds an argument for why women’s liberation rests on the
destruction of the nuclear family. She critiques childhood as a socially con-
structed idea that turns children, like women, into property. She identifies
the gendered aspect of racism, the underlying patriarchal motivations behind
romantic love, and the way that men and women interpret love differently.
Throughout her analysis she identifies the problem as centred around power
and the lack of access to power for women and children. Thus, the solution
for Firestone must address the underlying powerlessness of women that has
little to do with biology and everything to do with culture.
As suggested by the title, Firestone argues that gender will be transcended
as we progress towards the ideal future. Technology is the ‘realization of the
conceivable in the actual’ (Firestone 1970, p. 162), and modern empirical
science has made achieving the ‘conceivable’ possible. The division between
what is possible and what exists, Firestone argues, ‘is generating revolutionary
forces’ (Firestone 1970, p. 171). As a result, an economic and cultural revolu-
tion is possible, but only if it is ‘predicated on the elimination of the (sex)
dualism’ (Firestone 1970, p. 171). Firestone’s vision of the future recognizes
the malleability of gender and claims that only by transcending the dualistic
tendencies inherent in gender can we achieve liberation. Her future is androgyn-
ous made possible through technology.
While her goal is a future where gender categories are exploded, she does
not discount the possibility of transexuality as the norm (Firestone 1970, pp.
53–54). Firestone envisions the possibility of all possible sexual combinations.
She continues:

All other things being equal, people might still prefer those of the opposite
sex simply because it is physically more convenient. But even this is a large
assumption. For if sexuality were indeed at no time separated from other
responses, if one individual responded to the other in a total way that
merely included sexuality as one of its components, then it is unlikely that
a purely physical factor could be decisive. However, we have no way of
knowing that now.
(Firestone 1970, p. 54)
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 121

Firestone is willing to create an understanding of social identity that would

replace unitary notions of feminine identity. However, Firestone recognizes
that these identities cannot be immediately transformed, but can only change
over time and only after the dysfunctional systems that produce current gender
relations are dismantled – something only radical feminists can do.
Firestone reports that most Americans are not ready to embrace the full
implications of new technologies, including test-tube babies, choice of sex of
the foetus, artificial placentas, parthenogenesis, and cloning. However, it is not
the technologies themselves people seem to fear, but the possibility that these
technologies might challenge traditional male supremacy and the family. She
uses the example of a Harris poll cited by Life magazine, in which it was found
that many Americans would support these new technologies

only where they reinforced and furthered present values of family life and
reproduction, e.g., to help a barren woman have her husband’s child. Any
question that could be interpreted as a furthering of liberation per se was
rejected flatly as unnatural.
(Firestone 1970, pp. 179–180)

She astutely cuts to the important issue involved in technological innovation –

the underlying power structure must be changed, not the technology itself.
She notes, ‘that it was not the ‘‘test tube’’ baby itself that was thought unnatural,
but the new value system, based on the elimination of male supremacy and
the family’ (Firestone 1970, p. 180).
Dismantling the underlying gendered power structure is also important for
the realization of Firestone’s other technological strategy – the cybernation.
Technology has provided the possibility of redefining the relationship of humans
to labour and radically increasing leisure time. It is possible that ‘[m]achines
thus could act as a perfect equalizer, obliterating the class system based on
exploitation of labour’ (Firestone 1970, p. 183). However, for this utopian
possibility to exist ‘we will need almost overnight, in order to deal with the
profound effects of fertility control and cybernation, a new culture based on
a radical redefinition of human relationships and leisure for the masses’ (Fire-
stone 1970, p. 183). Firestone envisions a feminist revolution:

A feminist revolution could be the decisive factor in establishing a new

ecological balance: attention to the population explosion, a shifting of
emphasis from reproduction to contraception, and demands for the full
development of artificial reproduction would provide an alternative to
the oppressions of the biological family; cybernation, by changing man’s
relationship to work and wages, by transforming activity from ‘work’ to
‘play’ (activity done for its own sake), would allow for a total redefinition
of the economy, including the family unit in its economic capacity. The
122 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

double course that man should till the soil by the sweat of his brow and
that woman should bear in pain and travail would be lifted through techno-
logy to make humane living for the first time a possibility. The feminist
movement has the essential mission of creating cultural acceptance of the
new ecological balance necessary for the survival of the human race in the
twentieth century.
(Firestone 1970, p. 184)

It is important, that an ‘add women and stir’ approach is not taken to the
upcoming technological and cultural revolution. The underlying power struc-
ture based on gender must be dismantled. To ignore the necessity of gender
transformation is to enter a failed social experiment.
Instead of the humanistic, and egalitarian future envisioned by Firestone,
‘the drafting of women into a male world, rather than the elimination of sex
class distinction’ causes a dystopian future

[b]ecause no provision has been made to re-establish the female element

in the outside world, to incorporate the ‘personal’ into the ‘public’,
because the female principle has been minimized or obliterated rather than
diffused to humanize the larger society, the result is a horror.
(Firestone 1970, pp. 190–191)

Firestone’s critique continues to be relevant as women enter the workforce on

male terms. The system has not changed; women simply have learned to
operate like men. Technological solutions must be accompanied with a trans-
formation of the sex-class system or the outcome will be the continued oppres-
sion of women and/or the absorption of women into the male system.
Firestone makes specific recommendations regarding family structures,
where she advocates the elimination of marriage as an institution, the formation
of larger family structures, the dilution of nuclear parenting, and other radical
manoeuvres to eliminate the sex-class oppression of women. She hopes the
result will be a society that transcends gender and becomes more androgynous
where both men and women can care and nurture children. It is a future where
children are freed from being the property of their parents and compulsory
education has been eliminated (Firestone 1970, pp. 202–216).
Given the critique of gender oppression developed by Firestone and her
technological solutions, it is important to re-read Firestone for the information
age. Firestone was instrumental in developing a model for gender transforma-
tion that can (and does) serve as a basis for cyberfeminist writings today. In
fact, it is unfortunate that more contemporary feminists do not actively engage
with Firestone’s text as an important precursor to the modern feminist agenda
regarding the role of information technology in our lives. There is much that
should be taken from Firestone’s work and much that continues to be relevant.
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 123

Her call to transcend gender and construct an androgynous future seems equally
salient and certainly compatible with Haraway’s cyborg future. Furthermore,
her critique of technology combined with her understanding of its’ libratory
potential continues to be an important theme for feminist discussion. Finally,
the second-wave feminist focus on political activism should be retrieved within
the information society. Thus, Firestone can make an important contribution
to our understanding of the information society, and I would like to examine
her work further in relation to contemporary feminists who have taken up
technology and cyberspace as important avenues for feminist analysis.

Radical feminism in the information age

Perhaps an important question that begs to be asked thirty years after the pub-
lication of The Dialectics of Sex is: why has technology not led to the transforma-
tions Firestone wanted? I would like to address two aspects of the information
age important to feminism and link them through the theme of the body. The
body has long been of interest to feminists as the site from which oppression
emerges. Firestone discusses reproductive technologies and the importance of
controlling these technologies because in her view, women’s oppression is
centred on control of women’s bodies. This theorizing of the body has changed
along with evolving technology. However, the body continues to be an important
theme in contemporary assessments of the information age. Contemporary fem-
inists are interested in hybrid bodies, becoming disembodied through the con-
struction of identity on the Internet, and exploitation of women’s bodies both
real and virtual (rape in cyberspace etc.). Thus, despite the seemingly disembod-
ied world of the Internet, a central theme that continues to be relevant is the
role played by women’s bodies. In investigating the information society, I will
look at the role technology plays in the everyday lives of women, especially
reproductive technologies and the ways in which feminist analyse the Internet.
Firestone did not suggest that the process of transcending gender was
inevitable; rather, she argued such a transformation is possible through political
struggle on the part of women. Mainstream second-wave feminists marginalized
the radical feminists during the politically tumultuous 1970s. Just as voting
rights became the central focus of the first-wave feminist movement in an
effort to build consensus between radical and conservative feminists, so too
did educational and employment issues become central to the second-wave
feminists at the expense of the more far-reaching structural and social critiques
advocated by the radical feminists. While liberal feminists were successful in
creating new opportunities for women, all feminists suffered from the inevitable
backlash documented by Susan Faludi (1991).
Throughout the eighties and nineties, feminists continued to be concerned
with scientific and technological issues. The success of the women’s movement
124 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

in providing access to birth control and abortions, techniques that extended

more power and control over their bodies to women, has since been over-
shadowed by the ways modern reproductive technologies, such as in vitro
fertilization, have appropriated childbirth and motherhood within a patriarchal
system. There continues to be a great deal of debate and disagreement over the
‘appropriate’ feminist response to reproductive technologies. Some feminists
believe that new technologies, like in vitro fertilization, reproduce a narrative
of motherhood based on biology that serves as a form of domination (Halber-
stam 1991, quoting Mary Daly).
Other feminists claim that a women’s power stems from her reproductive
ability and that reproductive technology dehumanizes women further by remov-
ing reproduction from women and placing it into the male hands of scientists
(Wajcman 1991, pp. 56–60). As one women asked during a workshop on
reproductive technologies, ‘What happens when they don’t need our bodies
anymore for reproduction? If there’s less need for women to reproduce, there’s
less need for women. . .’ (Moira 1983, p. 4). For these feminists, ‘genetic and
reproductive engineering is another attempt to end self-determination over
our bodies’ (Wajcman 1991, p. 58). Instead of understanding reproductive
technology as liberating women from childbirth, these feminists question why
women would want to give up their ‘ace in the hole’, their exclusive control
over pregnancy (Moira 1983, p. 4).
While there is some disagreement over how we ought to interpret women’s
relationship to modern reproductive technology, it is clear that reproductive
technologies have not fulfilled Firestone’s vision (Franklin 1998). Both feminists
who locate the problem with the patriarchal control of the technology and
those who reject technological interventions into reproduction ignore the
underlying argument made by Firestone. Feminists concerned with the elimina-
tion of women’s childbearing ability as technology takes over have argued that,
‘contrary to the ideas of Firestone . . . here is an increased consciousness among
women that pregnancy and childbirth are something they want to keep control
of, from fertilization through delivery’ (Moira 1983, p. 4). However, a close
reading of Firestone makes exactly this point. Firestone focused on how we
might provide women with choices and how technology might be used to
facilitate choices. She states, ‘until the decision not to have children or to have
them by artificial means is as legitimate as traditional child-bearing, women
are as good as forced into their female roles’ (Firestone 1970, p. 182). Only
once women have real choices and control over reproductive technology will
it become possible to move away from traditional women’s roles.
Additionally, as Firestone clearly articulated, the problem is not the techno-
logy, but the underlying sex-roles that it may or may not reproduce.

Artificial reproduction is not inherently dehumanizing. At the very least,

development of the option should make possible an honest re-examination
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 125

of the ancient value of motherhood. At the present time, for a woman to

come out openly against motherhood on principle is physically dangerous.
She can get away with it only if she adds that she is neurotic, abnormal,
child-hating, and therefore ‘unfit’.
(Firestone 1970, pp. 181–182)

Thus, the issue of reproduction and technology must re-centre itself upon the
bodies of women and the ways their bodies are appropriated into the romantic
language of motherhood. It is important to recognize, as J. Halberstam (1991,
p. 439) puts it, that ‘femininity is always mechanical and artificial – as is
masculinity’. Firestone recognizes that, given the current balance of power,
‘there is no doubt that the machine could be used – is being used – to intensify
the apparatus of repression and to increase established power’ (Firestone 1970,
p. 182). This repression is taking place both within the arena of reproduction,
but also within society more generally. Recognizing the way power works
through technology to eliminate women’s choices regarding motherhood is
important to understanding how to rebuild technology as a revolutionary force.
Firestone recognizes that technology alone will not liberate women and
men, instead there must be a transformation in the way sex-roles are under-
stood, a transformation that can only take place if technology is used to give
women choices other than childbearing. As Franklin (1998) points out:

The Dialectic of Sex still offers us a valuable critique of the kinds of cultural
values that brought us IVF, ICSI, PID, genetic engineering and Dolly the
Sheep. These techniques are not immaculate conceptions of the petri dish:
they are born of the desires and hopes of the scientists who invent them,
the clinicians who use them, the patients who ask for them, the institutions
which fund their development, the laws that legalize them, the media that
reports on them, and so forth. Above all, they are born from the ways in
which reproduction is defined and controlled in our time. And at the end
of the twentieth century, that turns out to be pretty much the same as
ever: technology or no technology.

Until we are able to change the underlying sex-role distinctions, technology

will simply reproduce inequality, not eliminate it. While technology gives us
the opportunity to move away from biology, there remain powerful narratives,
some created by feminists, keeping us from moving down a path towards
Firestone’s future vision.
Haraway (1990, p. 205) notes that, ‘Communications technologies and
biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody
and enforce new social relations for women worldwide’, the information age
is generally seen as revolving around the development of the Internet and the
new communications revolution made possible by this growth. Issues of the
126 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

body surface in discussions of communications technology, but the focus tends

to be on how communication technology may change the body. For feminists,
one important question is how, and if, these technologies are providing new
opportunities for gender relations.

Cyberfeminism and the information age

Cyberfeminism is a broad and complex body of theoretical work that includes
‘those arenas in which technological process is gendered in a manner that
excludes women from access to the empowering points of techno-culture’
(Wilding, quoted in Galloway). Cyberfeminism, very loosely defined as the
work done by feminists related to modern information technology, can be
broken into several interrelated categories. First, many feminists are concerned
with equal access to the Internet and to communications technologies. Associ-
ated with concerns about access are the ways in which the Internet remains a
male-dominated space and how women are creating their own computer net-
works and spaces online (Sundén 2001, p. 215). The second general cyberfem-
inist category moves out from the possibility of women’s spaces on the Internet
to make the argument that the Internet is a female place and illustrates the
ultimate triumph of female values (Plant 1996a, b). A final category important
to cyberfeminism starts from Haraway’s path-breaking work on cyborgs to a
feminist theorizing of transgendered bodies made possible within this new
space called the Internet (Sundén 2001, p. 215). While there are links between
these three types of cyberfeminism, there are also significant differences.
The first type of cyberfeminism reproduces a liberal feminist agenda on
the Internet. These cyberfeminists are concerned with equal access to com-
puters and the Internet by women (Herman 1999), developing all-female
networks (Sherman 2001), a critique of sexual harassment, cyberstalking,
pornography, and gaining positions of power, which remain central for this
feminist critique (Spender 1996; Jewkes 2003). These liberal feminists provide
an important analysis of the everyday life of women in the information age,
much of which seems to mirror women’s lives outside the world of computers.
Gorski (2002, p. 24) argues that, ‘most of the sex and gender inequities
which occur in society are replicated online’. Spender (1996, p. 183) calls the
linguistic practices of many men in cyberspace and their real-world domination
of computers a form of ‘sexual terrorism, designed to drive women away from
the center of power’. The behaviours she discusses begin in the computer lab
where male students often dominate the machines and engage in online discus-
sions, where aggression and criticism are understood to be the ‘neutral’ rules
of the road online (Spender 1996, p. 193).
Spender points to studies that illustrate the depth of male domination of
communication on-line, the inability of men to understand their own online
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 127

domination and instead to insist, often vocally and aggressively, that men are
being ‘silenced’ by women (Spender 1996, pp. 193–194). She notes, ‘terms
such as domineering, bitch, bossy, and castrating have all been used to describe
women who take up more than 30 per cent of the conversation space’ (Spender
1996, p. 193). Additionally, men often intervene on women’s discussion groups
to post abusive and sexually explicit comments (Spender 1996, p. 196), a
behaviour interpreted as harassment designed to better define the Internet as
male turf. Women who complain about the aggressive language on the net are
told that they should toughen up and get used to it, or ‘stay out of the kitchen’.
(Spender 1996, p. 197). Spender concludes (1996, p. 198), ‘Despite the
enormous potential of the net to be a network – to promote egalitarian,
cooperative communication exchanges – the virtual reality is one where aggres-
sion, intimidation and plain macho-mode prevail.’
Other feminist scholars identify the numerous ways in which the Internet
facilitates the exploitation of women and children (Gillespie 2000). Mail-order
brides and babies have become commonplace with the help of the Internet
(Jewkes 2003). Pornography is a popular use of new communications techno-
logy, and the Internet has allowed previously marginalized and deviant groups
to connect with each other, thus eliminating some of the social stigma deviance
attaches to their activities (Sharp & Earle 2003). Finally, hacker culture remains
predominantly male if not outright misogynist (Taylor 2003). The Internet,
rather than a radically new mode of communication, can perpetuate the sexism
that exists in the ‘real’ world and facilitates the trade of women’s bodies (both
real and virtual) in a more efficient manner.
The world of women on the Internet is not completely bleak. Feminist
scholars are developing work on why women matter on the Internet (Consaluo
& Paasonen 2002) and there is evidence that women’s participation on the
Internet has grown, thus eliminating some concerns about access (Bowker &
Liu 2001). Women are using information technology to create women’s net-
works online (Burke 1999; Sherman 2001). Additionally, many women are
resisting the male domination of cyberspace by creating empowering interna-
tional networks for women (Harcourt 2000). Shade (2002) argues that the
Internet is to third-wave feminists what independent feminist presses were to
the second wave. Thus, for many cyberfeminists, female networks are an act
of resistance to a relatively male-dominated network.
The liberal feminist concerns regarding the Internet are important and
highlight the lack of options open for women. Women today, much like thirty
years ago, continue to be bound by their gender, and the existence of an
underlying male domination remains a concern. While it may be the case that
gender can be flexible online, one’s online life is much easier if you are male.
Firestone would most likely wish for cyberfeminists to go further. The creation
of all-women’s networks may result in the development of a parallel space for
women, but will perhaps stop short of creating a post-gendered world.
128 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

Building upon the construction of parallel all-women’s spaces online, a

second category of cyberfeminism goes beyond creating networks for women
on the Internet and claims that cyberspace, framed by the metaphor of a web,
is an inherently female space. It is possible to meet the misogyny of the online
world with an overtly feminist response, a response that has been articulated
by Sadie Plant. According to Paasonen (1998, p. 16), Sadie Plant is:

Mapping information networks as a space for feminist utopia, theory come-

to-life, the imaginary revisited: in the words of Sara Diamond, as a ‘unique
pre-Oedipal stage where no identity is fixed’. Plant aims not to deconstruct
notions of ‘cyberspace’, nor the limitations and power relations of the
Internet, but to picture the Internet as cyberspace and a quintessentially
feminine one.
(Paasonen 1998, p. 16)

Plant’s project is utopian and Hegelian, where the ultimate outcome will be a
feminine network that has rendered men powerless (Plant 1996a, p. 182). For
Plant, the Internet is a space women should control and inevitably will control.
She argues that the communication technology of the Internet is designed with
women’s ways of communicating rather than men’s in mind. As Plant points
out, ‘the notion that it is all masculine is a convenient myth sustained by the
present power structures’ (quoted in Spender 1996, p. 229). Plant suggests
that:

cyberspace is out of man’s control: virtual reality destroys his identity,

digitalization is mapping his soul and, at the peak of his triumph, the
culmination of his machine erections, man confronts the system he built
for his own protection and finds it is female and dangerous.
(quoted in Luckman 1999, p. 38)

According to Plant (1996a, p. 183), cyberfeminists of today are creating a

digital future where ‘there is no authentic or essential woman up ahead, no
self to be reclaimed from some long lost past’. This future has been constructed
by revolutionary cyberfeminists intent upon destroying the old world and giving
birth to something quite new.
There is perhaps some of the revolutionary vigour of Firestone in Plant’s
work. However, Firestone would most likely disagree with Plant’s ultimate
project. The project, according to Firestone, is not to place feminine values in
a superior position to masculine ones, nor to try to argue for the creation of
all-female spaces. Instead, it is to transcend gender altogether. Plant’s construc-
tion of cyberspace certainly offers women an interpretation (but perhaps not
the reality) that values the feminine. However, much like early second-wave
feminists that valorize feminine values, a cyberfeminism that constructs
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 129

information technology as ‘female’ simply reproduces gender differences

instead of transforming them, a solution with which Firestone would most
likely disagree.
The third type of cyberfeminism (and theorizing about the Internet more
generally) is a theoretical enterprise that takes up the issues of the body and
disembodiment on the Internet (Bell & Kennedy 2000). It is a cyberfeminism
that is concerned with the post-human body and builds upon the work of
Donna Haraway. It is possible to argue that the cutting edge of cyberfeminist
scholarship today begins with a vision imagined thirty years ago by Shulamith
Firestone. It is the cyberfeminists interested in post-gender issues that best
reflect the importance of Firestone’s early work for contemporary feminist
issues.
Instead of reducing humans to the inevitability of their biology, either to
privilege the female experience or to provide an argument for why sexism
continues to exist, Firestone (1970, p. 10) remarks that, ‘the ‘‘natural’’ is not
necessarily a ‘‘human’’ value. Humanity has begun to transcend Nature’. By
dividing ‘human’ values from ‘natural’ values, Firestone makes a radical leap.
We are not creatures destined to fulfil some biological imperative, but creatures
who create our own future and use our tools to design a better world.
Transcending the ‘natural’ is possible with technology and essential if we are
to avoid the problems inherent in the sex-class system. Humans must break
free of their gender roles to construct an androgynous future – perhaps in the
modern vernacular, a cyborg future.
Firestone could (and should) be read as the forerunner to Donna Haraway
(1990) and her cyborg manifesto. Both Haraway and Firestone attempt to move
beyond biology. As Haraway (1990, p. 192) puts it (in words similar to
Firestone’s):

the cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with

bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions
to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the
parts into a higher unity.

In many ways, the sentiments of Haraway mirror those developed by Firestone.

Both Haraway and Firestone are concerned with gender, but also with the way
technology constructs labour relations. Both see technology as a potentially
liberating force that can break through the ‘natural’ world of ‘traditional’
gender relations and divisions of labour. For both, the task is to create a new
language within which to discuss the issue of sex and gender. Firestone (1970,
p. 3) states, ‘That so profound a change cannot be easily fitted into traditional
categories of thought, e.g., ‘‘political’’, is not because these categories do not
apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through
130 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

them’. Haraway was also concerned with bursting through boundaries by

articulating the politics of the cyborg.
Haraway has, however, gone beyond Firestone in many important ways.
First, for Firestone, the dialectic project is completed when dualistic gender
relations are transcended and an androgynous future is achieved. Haraway does
not endorse this more traditional Marxian dialectical process applied to gender
roles and thus the importance of the cyborg is its existence in the present and its
contemporary boundary-breaking abilities. Instead of waiting for a future based
upon revolution, the cyborg exists today and is the mechanism for transforma-
tion, but not through revolution. Instead of simply seeking an androgynous end,
as Firestone does, Haraway suggests that the cyborg is both a means and an end.
Both wish to see a better future in which gender relations have been rethought.
However, Haraway has refined this vision by suggesting in a postmodern way that
living with the ambivalence constructed by the cyborg, without reaching any
specific conclusions, is a much more revolutionary act.
Haraway’s work has inspired other contemporary feminists to investigate
the relationship between the cyborg and the female body. Investigating the
relationship between the body and virtual reality has raised many questions for
feminists. The disembodiment associated with the information age is problem-
atic for some feminists because feminist theorists have located much of women’s
power in the centrality of the female body (Toffoletti 2003, p. 153). Those
who locate female experience in the body have marginalized theorists like
Firestone who wish to transcend the female body. Once feminist theory relies
upon the female body, the cyberworld becomes threatening because the under-
lying systems of male domination have not been uprooted and the disembodying
of females means their erasure. Thus, the goal of cyberfeminism is to construct
transgendered bodies that transcend the underlying currents of male domina-
tion – a difficult task. However, it is a task that some feminists think is made
possible through the type of disembodiment available in cyberspace.
As Toffoletti (2003, p. 154) argues, ‘To move beyond an ideal of feminine
identity located in established definitions of the material and reality affords new
possibilities for subject constitution in the techno-age.’ This subject constitution
becomes a much broader project when the possibilities of cyberspace are
employed. Toffoletti (2003, p. 155) continues, ‘Digital technologies are
expanding the scope of what constitutes humanness and the body.’ Thus, for
some, the liberating potential of cyberspace is in the way it will transfigure the
human body and allow for both women and men to enter a cyborg future as
transhuman/post-gendered beings.
There are concerns with this post-gender world as well. Sundén (2001,
p. 224) points out:

One of the problems with this utopia, where all women think of themselves
as cyborgs and are able to cruise the Web in conscious and subversive ways,
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 131

is that a whole range of other women’s experiences with new communica-

tion technologies are excluded. What kind of cyborg identity, for example,
can the woman who has been harassed online construct for herself ?

Again, Sundén’s concerns highlight the importance of Firestone’s contribution.

One cannot become a cyborg until the underlying structure of domination is
undermined. Haraway’s solution of ambivalence seems less likely to create the
relatively deep transformation necessary to see gender relations transformed.
Firestone is not afraid of calling for direct and revolutionary action, in fact she
has participated in these actions. How do we eliminate the underlying forms
of domination that make sexual harassment online a common experience for
women? Firestone may help us answer these questions and leaves us with an
important issue to discuss as cyberfeminists in the information age – where is
political action and how direct must it be?

Conclusion – a call to politics

Essential to Firestone’s argument is that gender revolution is necessary to best
utilize technology as a tool for liberation. Firestone herself was both a scholar
and an activist. Her book was in many ways the culmination of an activist’s
life. Today we read her words without remembering that Firestone was integ-
rally involved with feminist consciousness raising in the late sixties and with
feminist direct actions that called attention to the sexism of mainstream society
and the ‘new left’. However, it is unclear that such a clear line should separate
ideas and action for Firestone – hers was a philosophy of praxis.
Perhaps it is the direct call to revolution that puts modern feminists off.
Modern feminist theorists seem to prefer less explicitly Marxian terms, and
political action is missing from the feminist analysis of cyborg futures and post-
gendered bodies; however, perhaps this activism should be retrieved. While
cyberfeminists are involved in constructing a revolution, it is a different type of
revolution than the second-wave feminists envisioned. As Paasonen (2000) notes:

90s cyberfeminist revolutions are about forming spaces for women’s net-
works, producing content alternative to that of the malestream, and
empowering women as cultural producers and user[s] of technology. These
networks have no fixed centers and they do not aim at subverting the
socio-economic order, or imagining future societies – they function at the
level of the ‘micro’ rather than ‘macro.’ Few believe in the possibilities of
a socialist feminist revolution, but on the level of the personal as political,
dreams of change prevail.

Firestone would most likely believe that this relatively small resistance is not
enough. However, it may be possible to evaluate the creation of women’s spaces
132 I N F O R M AT I O N , C O M M U N I C AT I O N & S O C I E T Y

on the Internet as a crucial first step towards some sort of dialectical progress à
la Firestone. Perhaps Firestone’s revolution was not possible because the femin-
ine side of the dialectic was so atrophied as to be wholly discounted. Addition-
ally, as the second-wave feminists were submerged under the backlash, issues
became less clear cut and women settled for the gains they had made. Perhaps it
is possible to assert some sort of women’s way of talking on the net that could
culminate in the transformation of gender in the ways Firestone sought.
To be sure, there are costs and benefits to the androgynous future described
by Firestone. However, given the critique of the nuclear family and the severe
dysfunction that Firestone claims results from this type of family relationship,
the transcendence of gender relations seems a favourable alternative. Addition-
ally, a post-gender revolution would only be possible under conditions of
gender equality; thus, what might be lost in terms of unique gender character-
istics (especially those values feminists privilege as feminine) would ultimately
be gained by everyone. While only a small slice of life, the Internet may serve
as an excellent experimental space for androgynous communication.
The information age and the technologies that are changing our lives
have not successfully facilitated a feminist transformation, in part because the
underlying system remains stable. Certainly, women’s gains in the past few
decades have been significant, but they have remained confined to the liberal
feminist agenda of access to the world primarily on male terms. This type of
access has been reproduced online where similar gender divisions remain clearly
drawn. Perhaps it is time for women to rethink their political alternatives. The
radical feminists of the late sixties and early seventies were often perceived as
radical because they sought to clarify the hidden assumptions upon which social
structures rested. They didn’t simply write about these problems: they publicly
protested and engaged in direct action to ‘raise consciousness’. However,
feminist scholarship has moved far from its activist roots. I’m not sure what a
feminist political movement for the information society might look like, perhaps
not much different from the initial movement. However, it seems important
that a movement that goes beyond theory into action takes place.
We can place hope in a feminist vision of the future, however that future
may be conceptualized. The future may see gender relations through the lens
of androgyny, the cyborg, or as a network; but realize that the future takes
action, a revolution in Firestone’s words, and such a revolution will rock the
boat of the small gains made by liberal feminists. However, if there is the
possibility of such a future, then it is one where the politics of the information
age must be defined in revolutionary terms.

Notes
1 Of course this question oversimplifies the issue. Questions of equality versus
difference abound in the feminist literature and ways in which identity has
 SHULAMITH FIRESTONE 133

been constructed continues to make claims about equality and women’s

roles difficult to make. Additionally, while legal discrimination is no longer
the norm in most western countries, little has been to displace traditional
gender roles, roles and identities that are contested and embraced by
feminists.
2 Thanks to modern technology the articles from this journal can be found
online. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, another feminist organiza-
tion from the late sixties/early seventies has created a ‘herstory’ website
where they have archived important texts from the early feminist movement
(see: http://www.cwluherstory.com).

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Debora Halbert is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Otterbein

College. She has published numerous articles on intellectual property law as
it relates to the information age. Address: Department of History/Political
Science, One Otterbein College, Westerville OH 43081, USA. [email:
DHalbert@otterbein.edu]
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