HER EARLY LIFE WAS TAINTED BY ABUSE AND HARDSHIP Without absolving or condoning her near-fatal attack on Warhol, I’d like to attempt to reconsider the life of Valerie Solanas with the same level of understanding and mitigation that’s been shown to so many of her male peers. Today marks the would-be birthday of Solanas, who was born in 1936. The weight of history has reduced Valerie Solanas – with her righteous anger and searing intellect – to the caricature of a ‘schizo dyke’ and failed assassin. As the philosopher, Avital Ronell observed, when you’re a woman “your scream might be noted as part of an ensemble of subaltern feints – the complaint, the nagging, the chattering, the nonsense by which women’s speech has been largely depreciated”. She had something vital and prescient to say, but history has a way of subjugating women who refuse to behave. It’s extreme and polarising, but it’s also acerbic, prophetic, and deeply relevant. In what was initially a self-published text, Solanas called for the elimination of the male sex and the money system.
She wasn’t a prolific writer, but her most notable work, the SCUM Manifesto, is one of the most uncompromising and controversial feminist tracts you’ll ever read. But you’re more likely to know Valerie Solanas as the maniac who shot Andy Warhol. She was championed by the National Organisation for Women and hailed as “one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement” by the radical lawyer Florynce Kennedy. She was once declared “the Robespierre of feminism” by the celebrated writer, activist, and chronicler of American life, Norman Mailer.
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