Here's the main reason. Firestone wanted to eliminate the following things: sex roles, procreative sex, gender, childhood, monogamy, mothering, the family unit, capitalism, the government, and especially the physiological phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth. She wanted to mechanize reproduction -- gestating fetuses in artificial wombs -- and raise the offspring communally, treating them no differently from adults at the earliest possible age. Sound crazy? It was certainly extreme. But it's surprising how many ideas that are now starting to gain currency can be found in kernel form in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex.

When parents choose to raise their children gender-neutral, a lot of that's Firestone. When we hail advances in artificial reproduction, we're seeing developments that Firestone championed decades ago. When writers theorize about the end of men, they're tearing whole pages out of Firestone's book. We know how Gurley Brown influenced us. Yet we know nothing about Firestone.

Tongues of flame: Lady Marx and the feminist analytic

The Dialectic of Sex, by far Firestone's most famous work, appeared in 1970 when she was 25. (The text of the book's opening chapter is here.) It was a different time. Radicalism in general had more currency, and it is easy to forget just how much more, as evidenced by the (at least) 10 printings this book went through in the years after it was published. Firestone was heralded as a feminist philosopher on par with Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Freidan for imagining a world where "genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally."

This was Firestone's central ambition, and the book reflects as much. She feels free to revise Marx and Engels. She takes pot-shots at Freud in her critique of psychoanalysis. She tries to explain away racial antagonism, saying it has its basis in nothing other than gender distinctions and will disappear when the gender crisis resolves. (This is particularly problematic given the complicated history of race in feminism.)

Why did Firestone want to eliminate gender? She argued - taking Marxism and skewing it -- that all forms of oppression were rooted in an antagonism between men and women. Resolving this antagonism would pave the road to utopia and cure society of its ills.

This belief -- that the battle of the sexes was the source of all ill -- leaves a radical feminist with few options. Option one is to destroy all men. Firestone did not want to eliminate men, although she didn't like them much. She believed the gender system oppressed men, too. What she wanted was radical equality. The only way to achieve this, she thought, was to eliminate gender entirely.

How? At the core of gender -- and inequality -- was an accident of biology, she theorized. Women are the ones who are physiologically capable of carrying babies. All gender roles have their roots this simple fact. If you eliminate pregnancy and childbirth, you can eliminate gender.