“I keep thinking, I’m 22, what have I done?” Shulamith Firestone told the young documentary filmmakers who followed her around during her last year as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was 1967 and they’d chosen her as an exemplar of “the Now Generation.” “I want to catch time short and not just drift along with it,” she says to her off-camera interviewers. “I want to be a master of time, because it’s not enough for me to just live and die.” Intense, brilliant, exuberant, and terrified of wasting her life, she was already aware of the marginalization and pressure exerted by men on “any intellectual woman or woman involved in the arts.” The film was called Shulie and it was finished but never released, because in the end Firestone disliked it and refused to grant permission for it to be screened.

Thirty years later, the filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin would make an extraordinary frame-by-frame recreation of this archival film with the actress Kim Soss playing Shulie. She did this against Firestone’s wishes, which seemed like a brave and principled gesture, like something the younger Shulamith Firestone herself might have done, because the work had such value. But by then, Firestone had become extremely suspicious, reclusive.

The following year, Firestone’s book Airless Spaces—which she described as a “series of vignettes” depicting life on the inside of public psychiatric hospitals—was published by Semiotext(e). Shulamith attended the launch of her book that we arranged at a small East Village gallery on Avenue A. She was too shy to read from the book, so the reading was done by some of her friends: among them, the visionary feminist theorist Kate Millett who, like Shulamith, had shuttled in and out of psychiatric institutions. Firestone leaned against the brick wall while her friends read, beaming.

A few months after she finished art school, Firestone moved to New York and into a small East Village apartment on E. 2nd Street. A few years later, she found a second apartment on E. 10th Street where she’d live for the rest of her life. The place was between First Avenue and Avenue A—“the other side of the tracks,” as she describes it in one of these stories, casually but very precisely parsing the difference between the quality of life in the neighborhoods east and west of Second Avenue.

She does this over and over again. The very short stories in Airless Spaces masterfully depict all kinds of minor atrocities that eventually lead to each person’s downfall: a forced shower, a snub, a slow-moving bureaucracy, a repurposed lounge. The facts themselves are the commentary. As in Pialat’s Naked Childhood or Bresson’s Balthazar, all of the characters in Airless Spaces are set on a slow but inevitable downward trajectory. Firestone’s goal as a writer is to show us exactly how they got there. The book contains a section called “Losers” but no antonymic section called “Winners,” because who ever wins, really? It’s no coincidence that Firestone read a great deal of Dostoevsky.

The stories in Airless Spaces all demonstrate the confluence between the relatively smooth movement of institutional control and the erratic and sludgy course of the lives of its subjects. The institution’s systemic actions are almost always the catalyst for the small tragedies that occur in each of these stories. But as Firestone shows, the system’s casual brutality has a powerful afterlife. Over and over, we see the resulting psychic disintegration attain a life of its own, finally enmeshing the subject in paralyzed entropy.

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As a very young woman Shulamith Firestone attended civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. She briefly considered aligning herself with the Catholic Marxist organization the Catholic Worker. But by the time she left Chicago, Firestone was already disillusioned with the New Left and its marginalization of women’s concerns. In New York, she cofounded a group called New York Radical Women, where female activists from different leftist organizations met to discuss their concerns. As Susan Faludi writes in her beautiful essay on Firestone’s life, “Death of a Revolutionary,” Radical Women was the first New York group of its kind: a place where women got together to talk about their lives, a place where political principles crystallized through the sharing of each person’s experience. She was radicalized further when she and her feminist colleagues at a New Left demonstration were heckled and booed off the stage. In 1969 Firestone organized the first abortion speak-out at Judson Church in New York. She was directly or indirectly involved in dozens of radical feminist actions and groups. At the same time—at age 24 and in just a few months—she wrote The Dialectic of Sex, which became a feminist and radical-activist classic.

Subtitled The Case for Feminist Revolution, The Dialectic of Sex called upon readers to conduct an analysis of the “sex war” as comprehensive as Marx and Engels’s analysis of the class struggle that occurs within dialectical materialism. In fact, such an analysis would be “more comprehensive,” she wrote. “For we are dealing . . . with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom. . . . Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself.” Dialectic also famously proposed Firestone’s “‘dream’ action”—a smile boycott where “all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them. The revolution will begin when women stop smiling.”

The Dialectic of Sex was released as a mass-market paperback and published in multiple languages. Thousands of women read The Dialectic of Sex when it came out and felt like their lives had been changed by it. The book had that power, analysis coupled with rage. I read it when I was 15 and could not stop observing the traitorous smiles of my classmates and teachers and friends. Firestone wrote presciently about technology, gender, and childhood, and the book remains a powerful influence.

Like Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, The Dialectic of Sex became a very popular book and Shulamith was invited to present the feminist case on network TV. Despite her extreme disdain for celebrity media culture, she became a respected and recognized public figure. And this turned out to be a grave problem within the New York feminist-cadre circles that she led and belonged to.

By the time Dialectic was published in 1970, American radical feminism was already moving toward a New Agey essentialism of moon-goddess rites and “total democracy” that seemed to borrow a page from Maoist China’s cultural revolution. Leadership and all forms of distinction came to be deeply resented. Those who asserted themselves as speakers were publicly criticized and then finally denounced. Firestone—who refused to “democratically” share in office housekeeping tasks of her cadre—was accused of “hoarding attention” and being “too intellectual.” She was formally censured and then expelled from more than one of the groups that she had founded.

Firestone touches on this devastation very lightly in the story “Myrna Glickman” in the “Obits” section of Airless Spaces. Her avatar Rozzie comes back into touch with her former best friend Myrna Glickman through a mutual friend after more than two decades. Myrna, she explains, had once collaborated with Rozzie’s powerful enemy Leslie Modrell to oust her from their “supposedly leaderless” feminist group so that Leslie could assume control and eventually run it into the ground. But these struggles are now far in the past. The crux of the story concerns Myrna’s less-than-spectacular life after her life as an activist—she and Leslie now meet once a week to play poker together—and how her strange turns of behavior are abruptly explained by a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.

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Firestone didn’t publish any more books until Airless Spaces came out in 1998. What did she do during those decades? She was not diagnosed schizophrenic or hospitalized until 1987, but there must have been problems before that. By the time the neighbors complained that she screamed through the night and her sister Laya flew into New York to take care of her, Shulamith was completely emaciated, convinced that her food contained poison, and in the street begging.

During the next five years she cycled in and out of public psychiatric facilities regularly—never voluntarily, always on forcible hold. She came to know the language and logic of institutional life intimately: the “activities” and “treats,” the “group walk” and “community,” all connoted with quotes in these stories.

In the early 1990s, several women—medical staff, a few younger artists and writers who all recognized Shulamith Firestone’s tremendous influence and importance—gathered around her as a kind of support group. For a few years, this helped her to stabilize, and it was during these years that she wrote these stories.

Sometime in 1997 Beth Stryker, who was one of Shulamith’s younger friends, sent us the manuscript. Would Semiotext(e) like to publish Shulamith Firestone’s new, second book? I think we said yes right away before even reading it. But when we finally did, I was just blown away by the way that Airless Spaces wasn’t a memoir. It wasn’t a story of her mental illness and it wasn’t driven by any attempt to reconcile or explain her descent into psychosis. Rather, it was as if she’d embedded herself to bear witness to the secret, banal workings of the institution.

Still, as Shulamith notes wryly in her story “Stabilized, Yes,” to be stable isn’t the same thing as to be happy, or even content. Sometime after the publication of Airless Spaces she relapsed, and in August 2012 she died in her apartment.

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Shulamith Firestone grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, one of six siblings in an Orthodox Jewish family. From her earliest youth she rebelled against them and their religion bitterly. Still, rereading these stories, I’m struck by how Jewish they are on both a secular and spiritual level. Ranging in length between a single paragraph and several pages, Firestone’s stories are a lot like Talmudic mashals—exemplary stories or parables that allegorically demonstrate deeper truths or ideas.

At the same time, it’s the way that Firestone chooses to focus on people’s very modest ambitions and goals—release from the hospital before Christmas, finding a dark, quiet place to sleep in during the day, controlling the thermostat—that breaks your heart over and over. Often, Firestone’s people become the most powerful instruments of their own unhappiness. Eighty-two-year-old Pauline tortures herself over the selection of classical music in “Radio Station WISS.” And in “The Caregivers,” Berenice, short of money, becomes her neighbor Cleo’s part-time caregiver, simultaneously pitying her new client and deeply resenting her.

There are rules to observe if you want to get out of the hospital, as these stories demonstrate: shutting up, signing up for “activities,” repressing your “negativity,” kissing ass, earnestly composing answers to the empty, absurd prompts on their questionnaires, and all in all, allowing the institution to break you.

To Firestone, the hospital is a microcosm of the larger world. Everything moves through channels of power.

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