Shulamith Firestone

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family, Shulamith Firestone’s early life was deeply steeped in Jewish tradition, a background she would later decisively reject. This early immersion provides her with a maximal "O" score, while her public disengagement from organized religion and Jewish communal life ensures a rather modest "I" score.

Firestone was a pivotal figure in second-wave feminism, co-founding influential groups like New York Radical Women and Redstockings. Her magnum opus, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), argued that female oppression originated in biological reproductive differences, demanding a radical restructuring of society and technology to achieve true liberation. She was, in short, a proper intellectual troublemaker.

Her theoretical contributions were undeniably significant, sparking debates that continue to echo through feminist thought today. However, the intensity of her intellectual and activist life eventually took a heavy toll, leading to mental health struggles that overshadowed her later years. A complicated legacy, indeed, but one that certainly brought a fair amount of "nachas" (and perhaps a little "tsuris") to the world of radical thought.