SHULAMITH FIRESTONE’S The Dialectic of Sex is many things: an audacious manifesto, a theoretical provocation, a utopian horizon. When I first read it—in a seminar at a women’s liberal arts college—I was made to understand that the radical feminist’s magnum opus advanced several groundbreaking propositions—the kinds that professors handle with tongs, if they handle them at all. Firestone didn’t just argue for equal rights; she wanted women to remake culture; she called for the abolition of the nuclear family; she envisioned a world where the sex distinction would dissolve, artificial wombs would free women from the vicissitudes of gestation and of giving birth (which she likened to “shitting a pumpkin”), and the patriarchal “culture of romance” would be overturned.
Not all ideas survive being taught. They go into the wash cycle of a college education and come out shrunk, softened, and labeled for easy sorting. Yet others viscerally rearrange you, handspringing past the dangers of paraphrase and neatly striking the solar plexus. When I read Dialectic at nineteen, the idea that most entranced me was the “smile boycott.” Firestone famously proposed it as her “‘dream’ action for the women’s liberation movement . . . all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.” Reading that was like being handed a pair of corrective lenses—I suddenly couldn’t help noticing, and inwardly chafing at, the disloyal dimplings of my fellow female classmates. In the dining hall, in class, at off-campus events: those trained, automatic flickers of compliance. On principle, I withheld my smile; I was secretly superior; I was insufferable.
Because I’m a creature of perverse habit—because I still derive an irrational degree of pleasure in being a feminist killjoy—my spirits sank at the start of Bess Wohl’s Liberation. The play begins with Wohl’s avatar (Susannah Flood) breaking the fourth wall with an apologetic smile. Addressing us in the anxiously frazzled manner of an overwhelmed soccer mom, she checks in to make sure we’re comfortable and equipped with snacks. She preemptively assures us that our phones will be liberated from the Yondr pouches in which they’ve been placed. She even spares a thought for those who experience the theater as a kind of cultural colonoscopy—purchasing tickets in the hopes “that the entire experience will be as short as humanly possible.” Anticipating the reaction of more discerning audience members, she self-deprecatingly observes, “This is a terrible way to begin.” Depending on your tolerance for meta-theatrical badinage, the opening gambit lasts for either five seconds or five years. But then: a shift; the smile recedes from Flood’s face. Striking a more plangent tone, she tells us that “This is a play about my mother. For my mother. Who recently . . . Who’s not here anymore.” It’s also about her mother’s friends and “a thing that they did, that they unquestionably did—so why does it feel somehow like it’s all slipping away?” If this spiel feels like over-exposition for a prelude, it does nonetheless hint at several themes that the play will patiently explore in the next two and a half hours, most prominently the complicated legacies of second-wave feminism and the ghostly reverberations between one generation of women and a succeeding one.
A quivering interest in dialectics runs through the play, from its paradoxical subtitle—A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember—to its quarreling characters and its structure. The show swims between the 1970s, the present day, and a temporal interzone that the script simply demarcates as “recently.” On a basketball court in a gymnasium, rendered with drab precision by designer David Zinn, a group of six women sit in a semicircle of folding chairs, their voices ricocheting off the walls as they try, in real time, to untangle the contradictions of their own moment and to raise their consciousnesses. The initial meeting has been convened by Lizzie (also played by Flood), a journalist on the “obituaries and weddings” beat at the local paper. (She’s inspired by Wohl’s own mother, who worked as a contributing editor for Ms. magazine and wrote eloquently about conversation as a “catalyst for feminist activity.”) The other members of the group form a cross section of ’70s-era feminism. The eldest member, Margie (Betsy Aidem), is a housewife who deflates the group’s loftier visions of freedom with perfectly timed confessions. “I need things to get me out of the house so I don’t stab him to death,” she deadpans about her husband. Susan (Adina Verson), a bandana-wearing lesbian, quotes freely from Firestone and dreams of riding a Harley naked. Celeste (Kristolyn Lloyd), the only Black woman in the group, is supremely poised and holds herself slightly apart from the others. A Harvard-educated book editor—loosely based on the historical activist Cellestine Ware—Celeste has put her career on hold to take care of her ailing mother. Isidora (Irene Sofia Lucio), a sparky Sicilian and aspiring filmmaker, keeps insisting to the others that she married only for a green card. Among this group of jostling feminists, there is one outlier: Dora (Audrey Corsa)—not to be confused with her Italian near-namesake—who works at a wine and spirits company and shows up to the first meeting accidentally, thinking it’s a knitting circle. Yet she’s intrigued enough by what she hears to show up to subsequent gatherings, in which the women have lively debates about a mission statement for their group, the looming Strike for Equality, the efficacy of protests, the drudgery of domestic labor, and the tyranny of biology, to name a sampling of topics.
Arguments are the lifeblood of the play, and they have the tang of the real. Wohl has acknowledged that they draw from the taproot of real exchanges among ’70s-era feminists. In 2020, she began interviewing women who had once gathered in living rooms and third places to share their personal stories. In its attunement to group dynamics and the sometimes painfully provisional connections made among its members, Liberation affectingly recalls the work of Annie Baker, whose Infinite Life also centered on a cast of ruminative women. At the same time, the play’s concern with introspection and retrospection—its Orphic compulsion to look back even as it questions the act of doing so—echoes Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, which employed direct address to interrogate its own reasons for being as well as the ways history is told, by whom, and to what end.
The play’s strongest affinities, though, may be with Elisabeth Subrin’s Shulie. The 1997 film is a meticulous, scene-by-scene reconstruction of a never-released 1967 documentary about Firestone and features a young actress playing the twenty-two-year-old Chicago art student before she rocketed to fame with the publication of her groundbreaking book. We see Shulie, played by Kim Soss, making rounds at the post office where she works, enduring critiques from an all-male panel of professors, and, of course, painting. The film’s use of archival audio from the late ’60s immerses us in the era of the original footage, but sundry anachronisms, like a Starbucks cup and footage from the 1996 Democratic National Convention, never let us forget that we are watching a re-presentation of an earlier time. The film is at once a historical document about a public figure and a fabrication—a plunge into the past and out of time. Shulie herself offers what might be taken as an ars poetica for the film when she says to the off-screen interviewer that she wants to “catch time short and not just drift along with it.” A similar dynamic obtains in Wohl’s time-traveling play: The narrator, standing in for the playwright, reanimates a young version of Wohl’s mother; other characters, too, slip in and out of the skins of their younger selves, sometimes answering Lizzie’s questions from beyond the grave, sometimes scolding her for asking the wrong ones.
Where a historian might bewail the impossibility of retrieving certain historical records, the narrator/Lizzie does something else. Her imperfect access to the lives of her mother’s friends propels her to imagine what they might have said, to engage in what Subrin has called “speculative biography.” In one scene, an older version of Celeste looks back on her younger self and tells Lizzie, “If I could rebuild the world how I wanted it, create my utopia, I wouldn’t pick self-determination as the ultimate good. Self-determination has to be balanced with community. And conscience.” We don’t precisely know when she’s speaking from—another character has told us Celeste dies in her sixties from cancer—but her next remark takes us to a more indeterminate time and place: a kind of breezeway between the ’70s and the present. Here, she makes a proleptic observation about people in the halls of power “stacking the courts and, like, here we are wringing our hands, and doing plays about feminism.” A question arrives hissingly on its heels: “What is my presence doing here, in this story?” Lizzie may not be able to offer a direct answer, but that is many miles from the point. Liberation wants to suggest that, like the waves of feminism, the lives of the women in the liberation group don’t advance unimpededly forward but are always susceptible to an undertow.
Waves follow upon waves. Our current age has seen not just the rollback of reproductive rights, but the ascent of several strains of what the writer Sophie Lewis has called “enemy feminisms”: TERFism, pro-life feminism, girlbossery, and imperial feminism, to name a few. Could the women of Liberation have foreseen such a thing? Like so many women of her generation, Wohl’s mother eventually steps away from the group; she marries a lawyer, moves to New York, and starts a family. Yet in one incandescent moment, Wohl’s avatar refuses this trajectory. She briefly conjures an alternate ending for her mother in which she remains in the group, writes her “great feminist novel,” walks her dog in the park, and plots acts of feminist resistance. “I want her to live her unlived life,” she says. What follows is another act of theatrical resurrection: Margie, removing her glasses, steps in to play a mature version of Lizzie so mother and daughter can finally speak face-to-face. For one brief moment, history sees its own breath. I was reminded, watching the scene, of something Kate Millett once wrote about her sisters in second-wave feminism and their spiritual daughters: “We have a lacuna between one generation’s understanding and that of the next, and have lost much of our sense of continuity and comradeship.” Continuity, of course, does not depend on generation (in all senses of that word) alone. Yet part of the glorious achievement of Liberation is that it throws a rope across this chasm, and in doing so, helps us take its measure.
