Elizabeth And Shulamith Firestone Argumentative Essay

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Shulamith Firestone
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an abolitionist and most importantly, the leading suffragist of the women’s rights movement in America was born on November 1815 in Johnstown, New York. Her father was an important Federalist attorney who introduced her to the law and gave her the proper exposure to social and legal activism which allowed Stanton to realize, from a young age, how unjustly the law favored men over women. This early understanding of the discrimination between the sexes helped her set the course to advocating for women’s rights which Stanton was to travel the duration of her life. Stanton was one of the few surviving children of her parent’s marriage. Grieving, her mother fell into depression and her father wholly immersed himself into

Subtitled “The Case for Feminist Revolution” the book offered her extension of Marx, Freud and Engel’s theory saying that the domination of men over women was rooted in biology. Firestone insisted that the true freedom of women would enlist both an end to sexual repression and emancipation of children.Firestone argued that pregnncy and childbirth were barbaric and that the development of “test-tube babies” and other technological advances would allow society to seperate pregnancy and child rearing from sex ultimately freeing a woman. She stated that through destroying the nuclear family and the pressure on people to marry and have children would allow more committed couples to raise children without the pressure of female-male bonding. The book, “The Dialectic of Sex”, was translated into several languages, and hurtled its author into the front ranks of second-wave feminists, alongside women like Betty Friedan, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. It remains widely taught in college women's-studies