I’ve just found out that Shulamith Firestone, feminist, radical, and author, died on Tuesday.
Her The Dialectic of Sex: The case for feminist revolution (Morrow, 1970) was the first explicitly feminist book I ever read. I read a battered library copy. It was chewy stuff. I was nineteen. Her basic thesis was that if women didn’t have to bear children, we could eventually dismantle the oppressive patriarchal apparatus and attain true equality.
Here (lifted from Firestone’s Wikipedia entry) is a fairly representative quote:
So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility – the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ – would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.
—Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
If I remember correctly Firestone imagined artificial wombs. This vision influenced a lot of feminist science fiction. It influenced me–because it made me think. It made me work out what I didn’t like about her vision.
What I didn’t like was the separation of mind and body. On some level I’ve always believed that if we all–women and men–just loved our bodies more, not less, if we valued our organic and visceral selves, our overlaps and differences, rather than despairing over or disliking same, we would all be better off. We are our bodies. The more divorced we become from them, the more alien we become to ourselves and each other.
But that book was a mind-opener to me, the crack that let the light in.
Nicola Griffith 
Her book was revolutionary, but even some feminists were put off by birth outside the body. Shades of Brave New World. And yet we are still fighting over reproductive rights and who controls womens' bodies. She was a visionary alright.
So many women, I think, thought of their bodies as their only power; it must have been frightening.
As our technological capabilities grow, it is almost inevitable that human reproduction will move increasingly beyond the natural wombs of the biological mothers. (Indeed, it's also likely that it will move beyond random sexual combination, but that's another development in its own right). This is because, given the capability to avoid having to carry babies to full term, more and more mothers will opt to complete the process outside their own wombs.
Those developments are driven by ratcheting technological progress and hence are more or less inevitable. What is far from inevitable are the kinds of societies we construct which employ these technologies, the attitude they take toward reproduction in general, and the kinds of relationships they will encourage or discourage between the sexes.
It will then be theoretically possible to build cultures or subcultures which are mono-sexual — cultures made up entirely of men, or entirely of women, who need never meet members of the other sex even for reproductive purposes. (Indeed this is theoretically possible now, due to artificial insemination).
I strongly suspect, though, that most cultures will remain ones of two or more sexes, in which the majority of individuals are more or less heterosexual or at least bisexual with a stronger inclination toward hetero- than toward homo- sexuality. This is simply because such cultures are what our minds have evolved in, and thus in which most of us are the most comfortable.
What I hope to see is that, with the bonds of necessity finally slipped, we will evolve societies where all sexes and sexual orientations are equal at least before the law. This has begun to happen in America, the Anglosphere and Europe, and — if we win the current Clash of Civilizations and thus become the nucleus of the dominant global culture — I think the process will complete itself, to the betterment of all.
I'm not convinced we're any closer to artificial wombs than we were in Firestone's time.
On the other hand it would be chillingly easy to use brain-dead women to act as nothing but controllable baby machines.
And, of course, some women, still, are used primarily as non brain-dead baby machines. And some men (though far fewer) are used as studs.
The whole thing is kind of creeptastic.
The idea was in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time too.
Yes. Piercy was writing six years after Firestone.