In her collection Airless Spaces, Shulamith Firestone included a very short story called “Well-Nourished White Female.” It reads:
Could things ever be the same again between them, wondered Margaret. She had finished her sneak peek at the “Current Mental Status” form that her shrink had just filled out for her vocational testing under VESID. Axis schizophrenia, suicidal ideation, areas of weak impulse control: violence toward self. She guessed she had that coming. Judgment and Insight rated only fair to poor. Selective memory. But it was the Appearance that really made her wince: well-nourished white female with apparent tardive dyskinesia of the right arm and tongue. Couldn’t she just call her fat or jowly and be done with it? God knows it was not nourishment, but empty bread. As for the tardive dyskinesia, it was a palsy she no longer even tried to control: her tongue felt feathery and her speech was often slurred. At times she spilled her orange juice in the mornings trying to pour it into a glass, and she had to stop smoking because her lack of control of her hand movements made it dangerous. She had practically forgotten how to type, even if she did not have tardive dyskinesia. She was a poor candidate for vocational training.
But worse than this realization was her sense of lovelessness. She let the form drop into her lap. She had thought, somehow, that her shrink loved her. When no one else could. Now where did she get that idea? A paid professional. And the form was so cold.
“I want to do something!” Shulamith Firestone proclaimed when she was 22 years old. “Instead of beauty and power occasionally, I want to achieve a world where it’s there all the time, in every word and every brushstroke, and not just now and then.” This intensity had been with her from earliest age. Now, in 1967, she was on the verge of co-founding the radical feminist movement in New York City and just a few years away from writing The Dialectic of Sex, the 1970 manifesto that would secure her place in history.
Nothing gave Firestone more satisfaction than the act of creation. She had been drawing and painting since childhood; in her teens, she added poetry, photography, short stories. She enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago before she turned 20 and studied figurative painting. When sexism got in the way of her craft, she turned her focus to feminist organizing and political writing, founding influential women’s liberation groups and editing the first radical feminist journal.
The feminist movement feasted on Firestone’s ambition, charisma, and intelligence in those early years. Firestone cut a physically striking presence, too: petite, curvy, with a mane of waist-length, almost black hair, she fixed her dark brown eyes intently upon those who caught her attention. A radiant smile flashed, lightning-like, from her otherwise serious face. However, the personal costs of political organizing proved unsustainable for her, and within a few years, she rededicated herself to making art. But what presented as restlessness, indecision, and depression in the 1970s darkened, by the 1980s, into paranoia and harrowing delusions. Her creative production slowed to a halt. Finally, in 1987, after years of ever-deepening seclusion, Firestone was involuntarily hospitalized and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
The circumstances of Firestone’s later decades ruthlessly threatened her ability to create. Her mental affliction was stressful and terrifying. She was poor. For basic daily functioning, she had to take antipsychotic medication, but she could never forgive the effects the pills had on her, and sooner or later would stop taking them. As her acute paranoia and grandiose ideas would mount, they would eclipse her thinking, and she would be hospitalized, usually at Beth Israel Medical Center, half a mile from her apartment. There she would stay for weeks or months until she was released, always under the condition that she continue the medication. This cycle would continue for the rest of her life.
Firestone hated medication. Physically, emotionally, sexually, artistically: It dulled her. Coming off a two-month hospitalization, she listed some of the side effects of her prescription Risperdal in a diary: “bottomless appetite and rapid weight gain; loss of focus and concentration mid-sentence; inability to organize or remember; blurred vision in the mornings; ongoing sleep disorder; constipation; inability to make [pettiest] decisions.”
“Wanted to buy everything, eat everything, so grateful to have NYC returned to me.”
And there was another side to it, more complicated. “After higher dose of Risperdal,” she journaled, “see my reality was delusional + my judgment impaired — like a fever climaxing — bubble burst — leaving nothing on my mind at all.” Coming out of the hospital had been a heady experience: “Like flying. Wanted to buy everything, eat everything, so grateful to have NYC returned to me, as a renter of an apt. of my own, [in] quiet, privacy.” But before long, she was awash with regret about what her “lucid state” now allowed her to see: “Completely disappointed myself in not becoming a great writer but instead an impecunious recluse.” She expressed the anguish of not being able to “trust my inner reality,” yearned to regain her literary self “by reorganizing my subconscious into reliable deep spring it used to be.” This ability to self-reflect was a sign of what the medication made possible. It allowed Firestone to see all that she had lost.
Until her death in 2012, Firestone’s later years were consumed by this central tragedy. She experienced medication as her chief antagonist, dulling her vitality and selfhood, yet her ability to produce creative work — the thing she cared most about — required her to comply with treatment. How did she manage this ambivalence? “Well-Nourished White Female,” which appears in Airless Spaces, Firestone’s second and final book, hints at an answer: relationships. Human connection loosened the resistance Firestone had to medication, and accepting support gave her a tenuous lucidity, which in turn made it possible to continue her creative work. Most notably, it allowed her to publish Airless Spaces in 1998: a series of fictionalized vignettes about people suffering from mental illness, hospitalization, and its aftermath.
For more than a decade, from 1990 to 2003, Firestone entrusted her imperiled psyche to two psychiatrists, Margaret Fraser and Ann Campbell, and to a case manager, Lourdes Cintron. Intelligent, sensitive, and dynamic, the women became essential to her. Even as they occupied themselves with the unglamorous business of monitoring her condition and prescribing her medication, each understood who Firestone had been — a trailblazing feminist.
“Well-Nourished White Female” describes a patient, ironically named “Margaret,” who has just read her psychiatrist’s note with the titular description. Although physicians use this as shorthand to indicate that a patient falls within a usual weight range, Margaret “winces,” understanding “well-nourished” as a euphemism for “fat or jowly,” and feels betrayed, unloved. Indeed, lovelessness is the reigning sensibility of Airless Spaces, with portraits of humiliation and defeat accumulating into a suffocating bleakness.
In Firestone’s own life, however, matters were less clear. Airless Spaces was written over the early and mid-1990s, as Firestone worked to make sense of the turn her life had taken. Her ability to do so was made possible by a support group that Dr. Fraser called together, involving the two of them, Lourdes Cintron, and a handful of friends and feminist comrades. The group, which met monthly, existed to help Firestone manage her life — monitor symptoms, mitigate the stress of appointments, accomplish day-to-day tasks — and to make plans to hang out. Firestone would meet a friend from her support group to walk in Tompkins Square Park, sometimes swing by the dog park. They’d eat in diners, go to the movies, see art. The regular meetings demonstrated to Firestone that she had people behind her; quietly, but no less importantly, it communicated to those supporting her that they were not alone, either.
The group made it possible for Firestone to keep writing. Lourdes wrangled money from the Intensive Case Management program to buy her a word processor. One friend made a manual to help Firestone use the new computer; another taught her how to print, save, and title files. Marisa Figueiredo, a young feminist who had joined the support group as an admirer of Firestone’s, repainted her apartment and put up bookshelves so she could have an orderly space to work, and they agreed on writing deadlines for Firestone to work toward. Though the medication blunted the color and passion of her earlier writing, Firestone was able to revise poetry and send it out on submission, to work on her autobiographical novel, and to complete Airless Spaces.
It was not easy for Firestone to accept support. After years of seclusion, she had become private and mistrustful, and it took her several hospitalizations to accept that the source of her troubles had any basis other than poverty and isolation. She felt the hospital psychiatrists had severely overmedicated her, tormenting her with tranquilizers and antipsychotics administered against her will. Dr. Fraser recalled that when she first met Firestone as a second-year resident in Beth Israel’s psych ward, Firestone was “extremely focused on not cooperating with anything relating to treatment … She had this stone-faced, upright severity.” Still, Dr. Fraser acknowledged that her patient “could make a connection — to me, in some way, and certainly to Lourdes and to her friends. And I felt it was such a powerful connection that it was able to compete with how adamantly she wanted to remain an involuntary patient.” Firestone agreed. She wrote to her sister a few months in that she was “getting something out of network support … I feel like I’m establishing a good groundwork for any future stress.”
Though Airless Spaces conveys a continual feeling of lovelessness, love was clearly part of Firestone’s treatment. For Firestone, it stemmed from the modest but consequential relief of finding professionals she could trust. Sometime earlier, she had given her psychiatrist a copy of The Dialectic of Sex with the inscription “For Margaret, Best wishes for luck and prosperity from a very grateful client.” “I am still moved whenever I see this,” Dr. Fraser shared with me. “As a doctor, that’s the greatest gift: To call herself a grateful client is admitting a vulnerability. Not easy for someone who spent so long in her life with such paranoia.” Ann Campbell received similar acknowledgment when Firestone gave her an inscribed copy of Airless Spaces, published three years into their work together. Written inside: “To Ann, Whose help and support were indispensable to me — Hope we continue together for a long time.”
A patient can write her psychiatrists cards, give them presents. How can a paid professional show her patient love? She can be consistent; she can hold complexity; she can lavish the gift of close attention to detail and pattern that can make a person feel understood. She can also honor a patient’s life and vitality prior to the onset of serious symptoms. When Dr. Fraser tapped Dr. Campbell, a fellow feminist psychiatrist, to take over the group, the latter told me she didn’t want to say no — “How do you turn down Shulamith Firestone?” she quipped, but she wasn’t joking.
Dr. Campbell and Firestone saw each other for weekly sessions. The relationship enabled Firestone to go without a relapse from 1995 until late in 2001. Coming out of the hospital after a two-month stay, Firestone wrote in her journal: “Need to go back to my psychotherapist, Campbell. Have been sluggish in owning up to my responsibility to contact her, mostly out of shame at my steep relapse due to not taking my medication. She helped me for a long time, 6–7 years, complete with support group, helped me to write and publish again.”
By late March 2002, Firestone had recommitted to treatment. “Fading already into repression, the great iceberg of my psychosis,” she lamented in her journal. Firestone went back to work, this time on an autobiographical novel begun years before. Positioning it as “an unashamed potboiler [written] with movie rights in mind,” she sent part of the manuscript to a well-respected literary agent. She engaged with editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux about reissuing The Dialectic of Sex. Still, she felt far from herself. She emailed a friend that she was “waiting for a new drug to come on the market, which is a little less zombifying than what I am now forced to take.” When the agent rejected her novel, she felt “blocked … I’m afraid it’s really no good, or at least it needs the kind of exhaustive rewrite I don’t feel capable of now.”
Dr. Campbell had warned Firestone after her last relapse that they would have to stop working together if Firestone went off medication again, but, sympathetic to her patient’s urgency to regain something of her prior self, Dr. Campbell agreed to gradually lower the dose. “That turned out to be a mistake,” Dr. Campbell remembers. The lower dose “maybe freed up enough of her spirit to make her think she didn’t want to take it at all.” By spring the following year, Firestone stopped showing up for sessions.
Firestone’s old psychiatrist seemed rueful as she talked with me about the end of their work together. “Stabilized didn’t do it for Shulamith, as it should not have, because it meant that she was blunted. She wasn’t raving, but life didn’t have much happiness or contentment in it.”
The formal support group had shrunk by the early 2000s. Though several friends kept visiting Firestone on their own, the lack of collective support led Dr. Campbell to discontinue Firestone’s treatment after her next relapse in 2003. Firestone eventually saw a string of other psychiatrists through the hospital’s outpatient program. They seemed not to get who she was or care about her history. They simply monitored her medications. “That impersonality hurt her,” one friend remembered. Because Firestone never gave up trying for a life worth living, the cycle continued three more times: medication, stabilization, gradual relapse, institutionalization.
By the 1990s, Shulamith Firestone was far from the world she had envisioned at 22 — of beauty and power “all the time, in every word and every brushstroke.” To the extent that she could achieve, if not beauty, at least the power of her later writing, she required a sophisticated psychiatrist, medication, and the ongoing presence of committed friends. Airless Spaces, Firestone’s final searing work, is a record of her persistent artistry and a tribute to those who nourished it.
Lana Dee Povitz is writing a biography of Shulamith Firestone.
“Well-Nourished White Female” appears in Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone, which was republished by Semiotext(e) in 2025 and is published here with permission.
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