Dialectic of Sex

Shulamith Firestone was born in Ottowa, Canada, in 1945. She grew up in the midwest United States and attended Yavneh of Telshe Yeshiva, Washington University, and the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a bachelor of fine arts in painting. She was founder of the women's liberation movement and editor of Notes, a journal of radical feminism. Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex was published when she was just twenty-five years old and became a bestseller, as well as the first book of the women's liberation movement to propound a feminist theory of sex. She died in 2012.

Without so much as a single fanny joke or wacky dating anecdote, the Dialectic gripped and electrified thousands of people, giving the so called Second Wave of feminism much of its initial impetus and energy.