Shulamith Firestone

On the blurb of the back of Shulamith Firestone's collection of short stories, Airless spaces, the author is described as a non-professional feminist. The term "professional feminist", to my ears, sounds like an oxymoron. "Professional feminist" conjures up the picture of a power-claden, polity-making figure whose life is spelled PRUDENCE.

The stories of Airless spaces are far removed from the Professional. On the other hand, the characters of Firestone's short stories, usually residing in mental hospitals or returning from them, live in a society in which professionalism and ableness are virtues. "Pre-voc" tells the story of Brian, who lives on disability support. His rent is about to rise. In order to support himself, he has to take a job. But it is not easy to make one's way into the labor market. Brian has to prove himself able; he has to prove that he is "ready". The story raises the question: what does it mean to be ready for the labor market? What kind of persons does the labor market desire? Brians signs up for pre-vocational training. Even that is hard to accomplish, because he has to attend another form of training first. After having finished "Pre-voc" and the other stories I feel drained, sad but a little more clear-headed. This sounds paradoxical. The stories of the book depict misery and isolation, yet they are written in a deadpan, minimalist style that never sentimentalize the mental patient's or post-mental patient's struggle with his or her life.

One story revolves around Valerie Solanas. The author met her, and didn't like her. She says that she didn't consider SCUM Manifesto a work of serious feminism and neither did she want to consider Solanas a fellow theoretician. Firestone is a famous second-wave feminist who wrote The Dialectics of sex, a work considered to epitomize marxist, radical feminism. But nonetheless, the portrait of Solanas is tender. Tender, and grim. Solanas is just as isolated and lonely as the other characters of the books. Firestone connects poverty, bureaucracy and loneliness in a striking, relentless way. Most of the stories are restricted to one page, perhaps just one paragraph. Firestone is one of the very few writers who manages to encapsulate a character, to strike a particular chord, in one single sentence. Where most authors wallow in endless descriptions of envioronments and psychological set-ups, Firestone captures a scene immediately, forcefully. She doesn't have to say much to depict a crisis, a change, an opportunity. The book is hard to read because it rings so true, it creeps so close to the skin of the reader.

Some time later, after I had moved to St. Mark's Place, I saw Valerie in the street. She asked me for a quarter, and I saw that she was begging. She had lost her apartment, and presumably her welfare. Later, a friend of mine who ran a store on St. Mark's Place said that Valerie had approached him for shelter. She was covered with sores, and wearing only a blanket to beg in. She had been out on the street approximately three months without shelter. Not long after that, she disappeared from the street entirely.

Airless spaces was published in 1998.