On 28th August, Shulamith Firestone was found dead in her Manhattan apartment at the age of 67. Firestone’s 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, is a carefully argued and inspiring call for a feminist revolution that still feels ahead of its time 42 years later. I’d just finished rereading it when I heard the news of Firestone’s death via the Guardian’s obituary of her and as a tribute I have collected here some of the parts of that work that I found the most provocative and powerful in the hope that others will be moved to read or reread this classic of feminist theory. Firestone is perhaps best known for her call for women to take ownership of the means of reproduction, and so take advantage of advances in medical technologies to free themselves from their oppression. However, her work is far more wide-ranging than its represented as in the many textbook accounts. Here I look at what she had to say about schooling and about sexuality. The page numbers are taken from the 1979 Women’s Press edition.
Familiar and strange fathers in education
They say ethnographers are supposed to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. That, however, can be a difficult task since we tend to be ignorant about our own customs and ideologies. For instance, research on parenthood has often taken traditional gender roles for granted. In most western cultures, mothers’ unpaid educational work has been seen as natural, something that educational researchers have reproduced by talking about parent involvement instead of the more accurate term mother involvement. Prominent feminist scholars, such as Miriam David and Dorothy Smith, have for long called attention to the considerable amount of educational work that women carry out on a daily basis. But what about men’s relations to their children’s schooling and education? My article published in the forthcoming Gender and Education 23(5) addresses this question. Continue reading “Familiar and strange fathers in education”