Shulamith Firestone's 'Airless Spaces' Reissued: A Feminist Classic of Institutional Neglect

Silver Press has reissued Shulamith Firestone's only work of fiction, 'Airless Spaces', originally published by Semiotext(e) in 1998. The collection of short stories, split into five parts—'HOSPITAL', 'POST-HOSPITAL', 'LOSERS', 'OBITS', and 'SUICIDES I HAVE KNOWN'—follows a nameless narrator through psychiatric hospitals and marginal New York housing. Firestone, a radical feminist known for 'The Dialectic of Sex' (1970), drew on her own experiences after being diagnosed with schizophrenia and cycling through hospitalizations. The new edition includes a reader with essays by Susan Faludi ('Death of a Revolutionary', 2013), Lourdes Cintron, Laya F. Seghi, and Hannah Proctor ('Unaccustomed Tenderness'). Faludi's essay details Firestone's ousting from New York Radical Women in 1969, which she co-founded in 1967. Firestone's body was discovered in her apartment in 2012. The book resists consolation, focusing on how rapidly hospital stays alter appearance and how social reproduction interacts with institutionalization. Stories of Myrna Glickman and Valerie Solanas gesture toward the dissolution of feminist solidarity. Helen Charman, author of 'Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood' (2024), wrote the review.