- 08/31/2012 by Rebecca Myles (WBAI)

Feminist writer Shulamith Firestone has died in New York City at age 67.  She was found dead in her Manhattan apartment by her sister and had died from natural causes.

Firestone was 25 when she published a radical critique of women's oppression titled "The Dialectic of Sex."  She argued that women would be liberated only when they were free from the burden of childbearing.  The book was a feminist standard in the 1970s and is still assigned in college courses.  Firestone retreated from public life after the book was published,  She was hospitalized with schizophrenia in the 1980s.  Her sister, Laya Firestone Seghi called her sister "a brilliant mind and a totally creative person."