Valerie Solanas

Valerie Solanas
Name	Valerie Solanas
Birth date	April 9, 1936
Birth place	Ventnor City, New Jersey
Death date	April 25, 1988
Death place	San Francisco, California
Known for	Author of SCUM Manifesto, shooting of Andy Warhol
Education	University of Maryland (B.A., Psychology)
Movement	Radical feminism

Valerie Solanas was an American radical feminist writer best known for authoring the polemical SCUM Manifesto and for the attempted murder of artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Her life and work, characterized by extreme alienation and a virulent critique of patriarchy, have positioned her as a complex and controversial figure in the histories of feminism, avant-garde art, and American counterculture. Solanas's actions and writings continue to provoke debate regarding mental illness, political violence, and the boundaries of radical thought.

Early life and education

Born in Ventnor City, New Jersey, she experienced a turbulent childhood marked by parental strife; her father was a violent barber and her mother a Catholic who eventually separated. After graduating from Ventnor City High School, she attended the University of Maryland, College Park, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in psychology in 1958. Her early adult years were marked by transience and poverty, as she briefly pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota before dropping out and supporting herself through panhandling and prostitution in various cities, including Berkeley, California and Greenwich Village.

Writing and the SCUM Manifesto

In the mid-1960s, Solanas began writing while living in New York City, penning a play titled Up Your Ass which she attempted to sell. She became a marginal figure in the downtown scene, occasionally interacting with figures from The Factory, the studio of Andy Warhol. In 1967, she self-published her most famous work, the SCUM Manifesto (SCUM being an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men), a vitriolic and satirical call for the elimination of the male sex. The manifesto argued that men were biologically incomplete and emotionally deficient, and that a female-led society was the only path to a functional world. She sold mimeographed copies on the streets of Greenwich Village and attempted to get the work more widely distributed.

Shooting of Andy Warhol

On June 3, 1968, Solanas went to The Factory and shot Warhol, as well as art critic and curator Mario Amaya. The attack followed her growing resentment over Warhol's perceived indifference to her work, including his loss of the script for Up Your Ass. Warhol was critically wounded, suffering injuries that affected his health for the rest of his life, while Amaya was treated for a minor wound. The shooting sent shockwaves through the New York art world and made international headlines, instantly transforming Solanas from an obscure writer into a notorious public figure.

Legal proceedings and institutionalization

After the shooting, Solanas turned herself in to police in Times Square. She was charged with attempted murder and other offenses. Her defense argued she was mentally incompetent, and she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by court-appointed psychiatrists. Initially found unfit for trial, she was committed to Bellevue Hospital and later to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In 1969, she was deemed competent, pleaded guilty to reckless assault with intent to harm, and was sentenced to three years in prison. She served her time at the New York State Prison for Women at Bedford Hills.

Later life and death

Following her release in 1971, Solanas lived an increasingly isolated and destitute life. She continued to write but failed to publish any significant new work, and her attempts to revive interest in the SCUM Manifesto were largely unsuccessful. She spent periods in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., often returning to prostitution and struggling with mental health issues. She died alone on April 25, 1988, in a San Francisco residential hotel from pneumonia; her body was not discovered for several days.

Legacy and influence

Solanas remains a polarizing icon, celebrated by some factions of radical feminism and lesbian separatism as a prophetic critic of patriarchy, while also viewed as a perpetrator of violence whose actions were rooted in severe mental illness. The SCUM Manifesto has been reprinted and studied as a foundational, if extreme, text of second-wave feminism and has influenced later artists and writers, including the riot grrrl movement. Her life has been the subject of several biographical works, plays, and films, including I Shot Andy Warhol. The shooting is a pivotal event in the history of the Pop art movement and the end of the 1960s counterculture era at The Factory.

Category:American feminists Category:American writers Category:American criminals