Valerie Solanas

American radical feminist author

• Born: April 9, 1936
• Birthplace: Ventor, New Jersey
• Died: April 26, 1988
• Place of death: San Francisco, California

Major offense: Assault with a deadly weapon

Active: June 3, 1968

Locale: New York, New York

Sentence: Three years’ imprisonment

Early Life

Valerie Solanas (soh-LAH-nuhs) was the first child of Atlantic City bartender Lou Solanas and his wife Dorothy Biondi. Hers was an unhappy childhood, marred by sexual molestation by her father. She also spent much of her youth moving from the home of one family member to another. Valerie’s parents divorced in the 1940’s, and her mother remarried in 1949 to a piano tuner named Red Moran.

Solanas grew up to be a troubled teenager who shoplifted and was expelled from Holy Cross Academy for striking a nun. In 1953, Solanas became pregnant by a man in the military who refused to marry her. Her son, named David, was adopted by another family.

Solanas graduated from the Oxon Hill School in Maryland in 1954 and enrolled at the University of Maryland that fall. While there, she wrote for the school newspaper, broadcast a radio advice program, and was a member of the Psi Chi honor society. Despite her academic success, Solanas was forced to leave her dormitory after throwing bottles down a flight of stairs. To pay for her education and her apartment, Solanas turned to prostitution, although by this time she was an open lesbian.

During her college years, Solanas, who majored in psychology, began to develop her signature radical feminist theory that women are biologically superior to men. She would later express these ideas in her notorious SCUM Manifesto.

After graduating from college in 1958, Solanas began a master’s degree program in psychology at the University of Minnesota. By the spring of 1959, however, she had dropped out. She lived briefly in Berkeley, California, where her younger sister recalled Solanas began writing the SCUM Manifesto. By the middle of the 1960’s, Solanas was living in were chosen and hoping for a career as a writer. She supported herself with a combination of panhandling and prostitution, scraping together enough money to rent a room for a few days at a time to write.

Career

In New York, Solanas sold self-published copies of the SCUM Manifesto on the street. The manifesto blamed men for all of the world’s problems and advocated their extermination. A later publisher of the work claimed that “scum” stood for Society for Cutting Up Men, although Solanas herself admitted that no such society existed and that she never devised the acronym. Solanas published an essay, “A Young Girl’s Primer,” in the men’s magazine Cavalier in 1966. She also contracted with Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press to publish her first novel. Around this time, she became associated with the circle of artists and performers around the pop artist celebrity Andy Warhol and the studio he called the Factory. Solanas hoped that Warhol would use his fame to promote her writing. In 1967, she appeared in two of Warhol’s films, I, a Man (1967) and Bike Boy (1967). She also gave Warhol a copy of a play she had written, Up Your Ass, hoping he would produce it.

Assault on Warhol

Solanas gained her greatest notoriety on June 3, 1968. Incensed because she believed that Girodias had tricked her into signing away her rights to all future written work, and armed with two guns, Solanas went looking for Girodias at the Chelsea Hotel. Finding that he was out of town, she went to the Factory and waited for Warhol. She was angry also with Warhol for refusing to produce her play and for misplacing the script she had given him. Convinced that he intended to pass the play off as his own, she shot Warhol and art curator Mario Amaya, then turned herself in to police that evening. Warhol eventually recovered from his wounds, and Girodias capitalized on Solanas’s notoriety by publishing the SCUM Manifesto later that year.

Legal Action and Outcome

Defended by the feminist attorney Florynce Kennedy, Solanas was determined incompetent to stand trial and spent a year undergoing psychiatric evaluation, which found that she was a paranoid schizophrenic. In June, 1969, Solanas pleaded guilty to first-degree assault and received a sentence of three years’ imprisonment, which included the year she had already spent in psychiatric confinement.

Upon her release, Solanas spent most of the 1970’s in New York, likely homeless. Sometime in the 1980’s, she relocated to San Francisco, where she worked on a new manuscript. She died of bronchopneumonia; police discovered her body on April 25, 1988, but its condition suggested that she had died several days earlier. Her new manuscript was never published.

Impact

Valerie Solanas is remembered as a voice from the most radical edge of American feminism as well as a reflection of the competitive, sometimes cruel, dynamics of Warhol’s Factory. Though a handful of women came to her defense after the Warhol shooting, most mainstream feminists have since disavowed her message. British researcher Mary Harron rediscovered the SCUM Manifesto in 1987 and rescued Solanas from obscurity, cowriting the script for the 1996 film dramatization of Solanas’s life, I Shot Andy Warhol. The George Coates Performance Works in San Francisco staged Up Your Ass in its 1999-2000 season.

Bibliography

Bockris, Victor. Warhol: The Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. This biography places Solanas within the context of Warhol’s life and artistic world, describing the effect the shooting had on the artist and his circle.

Heller, Dana. “Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure.” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (spring, 2001): 167-189. Heller compares Solanas’s life and writings to their depiction in the film I Shot Andy Warhol and argues the importance of the SCUM Manifesto to the history of feminism.

Jobey, Liz. “Solanas and Son.” The Guardian 24 (August, 1996), p. T10. This newspaper article offers one of the most thorough accounts of Solanas’s early life and teenage pregnancy.