Revolutionary manifestos rely on hyperbole and foreshortening, as well as cheek and verve, and Firestone’s 245-page instruction manual for the overthrow of sexual difference, racial discrimination, class inequality, environmental degradation, marriage, aging, disease, monogamy, boredom, religion, culture, neurosis, depression and the nation state was clearly ambitious. The ending paragraph of the book, which is among its least convincing, promises no less than “paradise on earth.” Still, in the 21-year-old Firestone’s own words it was only “a very rough plan” intended to “make the general direction of a feminist revolution more vivid.”1
Firestone was not so simplistic a technological determinist as many have claimed, and she didn’t promise that IVF would liberate women. Indeed of all her arguments in The Dialectic of Sex her views on science and technology were probably least representative of 70s feminism. In contrast to many of her contemporaries, it was Firestone’s utopian faith in technological progress that was unusual.
In her advocacy of “the benefits of modern embryology”, Firestone had more in common with the revolutionary socialist biologists, geneticists and embryologists who invented biofuturism in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the UK, where the terms ‘ectogenesis’, ‘cloning,’ and ‘transhumanism’ were invented. At that time a progressive political and intellectual tradition of literature, science, and cinema united figures such as H.G. Wells, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Charlotte and J.B.S. (‘Jack’) Haldane, Naomi Mitchison, Vera Brittain, and John Desmond Bernal—many of whom were members of the Communist Party and espoused the same methods, such as ectogenesis, as Firestone. At the heart of this tradition was the utopian aspiration to take control of evolution through technology—a project that has often been invoked as part of progressive causes, and is evident in both the birth control and radical ecology movements, as well as having played a major role in many revolutionary governments, including those of China, Cuba and the Soviet Union.
For Firestone, the importance of technology to assist women ingaining control over their reproduction was uncontroversial. Since the origin of sex distinction is “biology itself—procreation,” its elimination requires technological control of the means of reproduction in order for the tyranny of biology over women to end:
Just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and … their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the control of reproduction. [This will require] not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility—the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of childbearing and childrearing. And just as the end goal of the socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not only the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.2
The “new population biology” referred to by Firestone in this passage, and elsewhere in her book, refers to the new sciences of reproductive endocrinology, reproductive physiology, and reproductive biology that all emerged during the first half of the 20th century, and the immediate post-war period. To Firestone, the pace of developments in the life sciences, and in particular, understandings of the reproductive process, was both breathtaking and full of promise:
Now, in 1970, we are experiencing a major scientific breakthrough. The new physics, relativity, and the astro-physical theories of contemporary science had already been realized by the first part of this century. Now, in the latter part, we are arriving, with the help of the electron microscope and other new tools, at similar achievements in biology, biochemistry, and all the life sciences. Important discoveries are made yearly … of the magnitude of DNA … or the origins of life. Full mastery of the reproductive process is in sight, and there has been significant advance in understanding the basic life and death process. The nature of aging and growth, sleep and hibernation, the chemical functioning of the brain and the development of consciousness and memory are all beginning to be understood in their entirety. This acceleration promises to continue for another century, or however long it takes to understand the goal of Empiricism: total understanding of the laws of nature.3
In the contemporary era of stem cells, cloning, genetic screening, and transgenic organisms, as well as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, Firestone’s references to major scientific breakthroughs and significant advances in the understandings of life and death, aging and disease, and the functioning of the brain sound remarkably familiar. Also familiar in her celebration of scientific progress is the evocation of hope, aspiration, and ethical purpose. She thus returns us to the recurring challenge to feminism on the question of technology—what kind of science and technology do feminists want or desire?—as well as to the perennial matrix of this question for feminists, which is reproductive technology.
