Firestone, Shulamith

Sex Class versus Economic Class

In Dialectic's controversial text, Firestone adapts Marx and Engels's dialectical materialist framework to argue that the original class distinction was that of sex class, rather than economic class—that Marxism failed to realize it was the relations of reproduction that underlie the relations of production, and not production that had been the driving force of history. So “deep as to be invisible,” sex class for Firestone is, therefore, the fundamental social inequality; what is required to understand women's subordination, she argues, is a biological explanation that emphasizes the different and unequal roles of the sexes in reproduction, and the concomitant oppression of women that is their direct result. Within such an arrangement, women's liberation could only come from a feminist revolution, but not of the strictly economic sort that Marx and Engels envisioned. Whereas Marx and Engels predicted that the working class would seize control of the means of production, thereby eliminating economic inequality and class [Page 418]distinction, Firestone insists that the elimination of sex class could only come through women's seizing control of the means of reproduction, whereby distinct reproductive roles for women and men would no longer be necessary for reproduction.

Such a feminist revolution would turn on the emancipatory potential of reproductive technology. Contraception and artificial insemination were already in use at the time of Firestone's writing; as she put it, with choice of sex and test-tube fertilization “just around the corner” by then, development of the artificial placenta or even parthenogenesis were, as far as Firestone was concerned, real possibilities for the future as well. Once extra-uterine reproduction were to be achieved, gender parity and an androgynous society free of sex classes or distinctions based on biological sex would be inevitable.

...