Valerie Solanas

Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist known for her attempt to murder the artist Andy Warhol in 1968.

Solanas appeared in the Warhol film '' I, a Man'' (1967) and self-published the '' SCUM Manifesto'', a feminist pamphlet calling for the extinction of men. She believed Warhol was conspiring with her publisher, Maurice Girodias, to keep her manuscript from getting published. On June 3, 1968, Solanas shot Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya at the Factory. She was charged with attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a firearm. Solanas was subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to three years in prison. After her release, Solanas was arrested again for aggravated assault in 1971 after threatening '' Evergreen Review'' editor Barney Rosset. She continued to promote the ''SCUM Manifesto'' and was an editor for the biweekly feminist magazine '' Majority Report''. She became destitute and died of pneumonia in 1988.

Violence against men

Early life

Valerie Solanas was born in 1936 in Ventnor City, New Jersey, to Louis Solanas and Dorothy Marie Biondo.. Her father was a bartender and her mother a dental assistant.. She had a younger sister, Judith Arlene Solanas Martinez. Her father was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to parents who immigrated from Spain. Her mother was an Italian-American of Genoan and Sicilian descent born in Philadelphia.

Solanas alleged that her father regularly sexually abused her.. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother remarried shortly afterwards. Solanas disliked her stepfather and began rebelling against her mother, becoming a truant. As a child, she wrote insults for children to use on one another, for the cost of a dime. She beat up a girl in high school who was bothering a younger boy, and also hit a nun.

Because of her rebellious behavior, Solanas' mother sent her to be raised by her grandparents in 1949. Solanas reported that her grandfather was a violent alcoholic who often beat her. When she was aged 15, she left her grandparents and became homeless. In 1953, Solanas gave birth to a son, fathered by a married sailor. The child, named David, was taken away and she never saw him again.

After high school, Solanas earned a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was in the Psi Chi Honor Society. While at the University of Maryland, she hosted a call-in radio show where she gave advice on how to combat men. Solanas was an open lesbian, despite the conservative cultural climate of the 1950s..

Solanas attended the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Psychology, where she worked in the animal research laboratory,. before dropping out and moving to attend Berkeley for a few courses. It was during this time that she began writing the ''SCUM Manifesto''.

New York City and the Factory

In the mid-1960s, Solanas moved to New York City and supported herself through begging and prostitution. In 1965, she wrote two works: an autobiographical short story, "A Young Girl's Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class", and a play, '' Up Your Ass'', about a young prostitute. According to James Martin Harding, the play is "based on a plot about a woman who 'is a man-hating hustler and panhandler' and who ... ends up killing a man.". Harding describes it as more a "provocation than ... a work of dramatic literature" and "rather adolescent and contrived". The short story was published in ''Cavalier'' magazine in July 1966. ''Up Your Ass'' remained unpublished until 2014.

In 1967, Solanas called pop artist Andy Warhol at his studio, the Factory, and asked him to produce ''Up Your Ass''. According to Warhol, he thought the title was "wonderful" and he invited her to come over with it. He accepted the script for review, told Solanas it was "well typed", and promised to read it. However, when he read the script he thought it was so pornographic that it must have been a police trap. Solanas later contacted Warhol about the script and when she was told that he had lost it, she started demanding money. She was staying at the Chelsea Hotel and told Warhol that she needed money for rent so he offered to pay her $25 to appear in his film '' I, a Man'' (1967).

In her role in ''I, a Man'', Solanas leaves the film's title character, played by Tom Baker, to fend for himself, explaining, "I gotta go beat my meat" as she exits the scene. She was satisfied with her experience working with Warhol and her performance in the film, and brought Maurice Girodias, the founder of Olympia Press, to see it. Girodias described her as being "very relaxed and friendly with Warhol". Solanas also had a nonspeaking role in Warhol's film '' Bike Boy'' (1967).

''SCUM Manifesto''

In 1967, Solanas self-published her best-known work, the ''SCUM Manifesto'', a scathing critique of patriarchal culture. The manifesto's opening words are:

Some authors have argued that the ''Manifesto'' is a parody and satirical work targeting patriarchy. According to Harding, Solanas described herself as "a social propagandist", but she denied that the work was "a put on". and insisted that her intent was "dead serious". The ''Manifesto'' has been translated into over a dozen languages and is excerpted in several feminist anthologies.

While living at the Chelsea Hotel, Solanas introduced herself to Girodias, a fellow resident of the hotel. In August 1967, Girodias and Solanas signed an informal contract stating that she would give Girodias her "next writing, and other writings".. In exchange, Girodias paid her $500.. Solanas took this to mean that Girodias would own her work. She told Paul Morrissey that "everything I write will be his. He's done this to me .... He's screwed me!" Solanas intended to write a novel based on the ''SCUM Manifesto'' and believed that a conspiracy was behind Warhol's failure to return the ''Up Your Ass'' script. She suspected that he was coordinating with Girodias to steal her work.

Shooting

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas arrived at the Hotel Chelsea and asked for Girodias, who was unavailable. She stayed there for three hours before heading to the Grove Press, where she asked for Barney Rosset, who was also not available.. In her 2014 biography of Solanas, Breanne Fahs argues that it is unlikely that she appeared at the Hotel Chelsea looking for Girodias, speculating that Girodias may have fabricated the account to boost sales for the ''SCUM Manifesto''.. Instead, is believed to have been at the Actors Studio in Manhattan early that morning. Actress Sylvia Miles claimed Solanas arrived at the Actors Studio looking for Lee Strasberg, asking to leave a copy of ''Up Your Ass''. Miles informed Solanas that Strasberg would not be in until the afternoon, accepted the script, and then shut the door because she knew Solanas was trouble.

Solanas then visited producer Margo Feiden (then Margo Eden) in Brooklyn to convince her to produce ''Up Your Ass''. Feiden repeatedly refused to produce the play, so Solanas pulled out her gun and she promised to shoot Andy Warhol to make her and the play famous. As she left Feiden's residence, she handed her a partial copy of an earlier draft of the play and other personal papers. Feiden reported the incident to her local police precinct, but they responded with reluctance, stating that arresting someone because they believed she was going to kill Warhol was impossible..

Solanas went to the Factory and waited outside for Andy to get money. Morrissey arrived and tried to get rid of her by telling her Warhol wouldn't be in that day.. She left but later entered the building with Warhol and Factory assistant Jed Johnson. While Warhol was on the phone, Solanas fired at him three times. Her first two shots missed, but the third went through his spleen, stomach, liver, esophagus, and lungs. She then also shot art critic Mario Amaya.. Warhol was taken to Columbus–Mother Cabrini Hospital in critical condition, where he underwent a successful five-hour operation.

Later that day, Solanas turned herself in to police, gave up her gun, and confessed to the shooting, telling an officer that Warhol "had too much control in my life".. She was fingerprinted and charged with felonious assault and possession of a deadly weapon.. The next morning, the New York '' Daily News'' ran the front-page headline: "Actress Shoots Andy Warhol". Solanas demanded a retraction of the statement that she was an actress. The ''Daily News'' changed the headline in its later edition and added a quote from Solanas stating, "I'm a writer, not an actress."

Trial

At her arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court, Solanas denied shooting Warhol because he would not produce her play but said "it was for the opposite reason", that "he has a legal claim on my works". She declared that she wanted to represent herself and she insisted that she "was right in what I did! I have nothing to regret!" The judge struck Solanas' comments from the court record and had her admitted to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric observation.
After a cursory evaluation, Solanas was declared mentally unstable and transferred to the prison ward of Elmhurst Hospital. She appeared at New York Supreme Court on June 13, 1968. Florynce Kennedy represented her and asked for a writ of , arguing that Solanas was being held inappropriately at Elmhurst. The judge denied the motion and Solanas returned to Elmhurst. On June 28, Solanas was indicted on charges of attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a firearm. She was declared "incompetent" in August and sent to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. That same month, Olympia Press published the ''SCUM Manifesto'' with essays by Girodias and Krassner.

In January 1969, Solanas underwent psychiatric evaluation and was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. In June, she was deemed fit to stand trial. She represented herself without an attorney and pleaded guilty to "reckless assault with intent to harm"... Solanas was sentenced to three years in prison, with one year of time served.

Media response

The shooting of Warhol propelled Solanas into the public spotlight, prompting a flurry of commentary and opinions in the media. Robert Marmorstein, writing in ''The Village Voice'', declared that Solanas "has dedicated the remainder of her life to the avowed purpose of eliminating every single male from the face of the earth". Norman Mailer called her the " Robespierre of feminism". Historian Alice Echols writes that members of New York Radical Women knew "next to nothing" about Solanas until her 1968 shooting of Warhol, but that afterward, Solanas’s case became a among radical feminists, and ''SCUM Manifesto'' became "obligatory reading".

Ti-Grace Atkinson, the New York chapter president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), described Solanas as "the first outstanding champion of women's rights". and "a 'heroine' of the feminist movement",.. and "smuggled er manifestonbsp;... out of the mental hospital where Solanas was confined". According to Betty Friedan, the NOW board rejected Atkinson's statement. Atkinson left NOW and founded another feminist organization. According to Friedan, "the media continued to treat Ti-Grace as a leader of the women's movement, despite its repudiation of her". Kennedy, another NOW member, called Solanas "one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement."

English professor Dana Heller argued that Solanas was "very much aware of feminist organizations and activism",. but "had no interest in participating in what she often described as 'a civil disobedience luncheon club.'" Heller also stated that Solanas could "reject mainstream liberal feminism for its blind adherence to cultural codes of feminine politeness and decorum which the ''SCUM Manifesto'' identifies as the source of women's debased social status".

Later life and death

After Solanas was released from the New York State Prison for Women in 1971, she stalked Warhol and others over the telephone. In November 1971, Solanas was arrested again for aggravated assault after threatening Barney Rosset, editor of '' Evergreen Review''. She was subsequently institutionalized several times and then drifted into obscurity.

In the mid-1970s, according to Heller, Solanas was "apparently homeless" in New York City, "continued to defend her political beliefs and the ''SCUM Manifesto''", and "actively promoted" her new ''Manifesto'' revision..

Solanas may have intended to write an eponymous autobiography. In a 1977 ''Village Voice'' interview,. she announced a book with her name as the title. The book, possibly intended as a parody, was supposed to deal with the "conspiracy" that led to her imprisonment. In a corrective 1977 ''Village Voice'' interview, Solanas said the book would not be autobiographical other than a small portion and that it would be about many things, include proof of statements in the manifesto, and would "deal intensively with the subject of bullshit", but she said nothing about parody.

Solanas worked for a year and a half as an editor for '' Majority Report'', a biweekly feminist publication.

In the late 1980s, Ultra Violet tracked down Solanas in northern California and interviewed her over the phone. According to Ultra Violet, Solanas had changed her name to Onz Loh and stated that the August 1968 version of the ''Manifesto'' had many errors, unlike her own printed version of October 1967, and that the book had not sold well. Solanas said that until she was informed by Violet, she was unaware of Warhol's death in 1987.

On April 25, 1988, at the age of 52, Valerie Solanas died of pneumonia at the Bristol Hotel in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. A building superintendent at the hotel, not on duty that night, had a vague memory of Solanas: "Once, he had to enter her room, and he saw her typing at her desk. There was a pile of typewritten pages beside her. What she was writing and what happened to the manuscript remain a mystery." Her mother burned all her belongings posthumously.

Legacy

Popular culture

Composer Pauline Oliveros released "To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation" in 1970. In the work, Oliveros seeks to explore how, "Both women seemed to be desperate and caught in the traps of inequality: Monroe needed to be recognized for her talent as an actress. Solanas wished to be supported for her own creative work."

Actress Lili Taylor played Solanas in the film '' I Shot Andy Warhol'' (1996), which focused on Solanas's assassination attempt on Warhol (played by Jared Harris). Taylor won Special Recognition for Outstanding Performance at the Sundance Film Festival for her role. The film's director, Mary Harron, requested permission to use songs by The Velvet Underground but was denied by Lou Reed, who feared that Solanas would be glorified in the film. Six years before the film's release, Reed and John Cale included a song about Solanas, "I Believe", on their concept album about Warhol, '' Songs for Drella'' (1990). In "I Believe", Reed sings, "I believe life's serious enough for retribution ... I believe being sick is no excuse. And I believe I would've pulled the switch on her myself." Reed believed Solanas was to blame for Warhol's death from a gallbladder infection twenty years after she shot him.

''Up Your Ass'' was rediscovered in 1999 and produced in 2000 by George Coates Performance Works in San Francisco. The copy Warhol had lost was found in a trunk of lighting equipment owned by Billy Name. Coates learned about the rediscovered manuscript while at an exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum marking the 30th anniversary of the shooting. Coates turned the piece into a musical with an all-female cast. Coates consulted with Solanas' sister, Judith, while writing the piece, and sought to create a "very funny satirist" out of Solanas, not just showing her as Warhol's attempted assassin.

Solanas' life has inspired three plays. ''Valerie Shoots Andy'' (2001), by Carson Kreitzer, starred two actors playing a younger (Heather Grayson) and an older (Lynne McCollough) Solanas. ''Tragedy in Nine Lives'' (2003), by Karen Houppert, examined the encounter between Solanas and Warhol as a Greek tragedy and starred Juliana Francis as Solanas. In 2011, ''Pop!'', a musical by Maggie-Kate Coleman and Anna K. Jacobs, focused mainly on Warhol (played by Tom Story). Rachel Zampelli played Solanas and sang "Big Gun", described as the "evening's strongest number" by ''The Washington Post''.

Swedish author Sara Stridsberg wrote a semi-fictional novel about Solanas called ('The Dream Faculty'), published in 2006. The book's narrator visits Solanas toward the end of her life at the Bristol Hotel. Stridsberg was awarded the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for the book. The novel was later translated into and published in English under the title ''Valerie, or, The Faculty of Dreams: A Novel'' in 2019.

In 2006 Solanas was featured in eleventh episode of the second season Adult Swim show The Venture Bros as part of a group called The Groovy Gang. The group was a parody of the Scooby Gang from Scooby-Doo and was made up of parodies of Solanas ( Velma), Ted Bundy (Fred), David Berkowitz ( Shaggy), Patty Hearst ( Daphne), and Groovy ( Scooby). In the episode she is voiced by Joanna Adler. Most of her lines in the episode are quotes from the SCUM Manifesto.

Solanas was featured in a 2017 episode of the FX series '' American Horror Story: Cult'', " Valerie Solanas Died for Your Sins: Scumbag". She was played by Lena Dunham. The episode portrayed Solanas as the instigator of most of the Zodiac Killer murders.

In 2022, ''Up Your Ass,'' was re-published by writer and editor Leah Whitman-Salkin for MIT's Sternberg Press / Montana. This issue included a contribution by the writer Paul B. Preciado.

Influence and analysis

Author James Martin Harding explained that, by declaring herself independent from Warhol, after her arrest she "aligned herself with the historical avant-garde's rejection of the traditional structures of bourgeois theater" and that her anti-patriarchal "militant hostility ... pushed the avant-garde in radically new directions". Harding believed that Solanas' assassination attempt on Warhol was its own theatrical performance. At the shooting, she left on a table at the Factory a paper bag containing a gun, her address book, and a sanitary napkin. Harding stated that leaving behind the sanitary napkin was part of the performance, and called "attention to basic feminine experiences that were taboo and tacitly elided within avant-garde circles".

Feminist philosopher Avital Ronell compared Solanas to an array of people: Lorena Bobbitt, a "girl Nietzsche", Medusa, the Unabomber, and Medea. Ronell believed that Solanas was threatened by the hyper-feminine women of the Factory that Warhol liked and felt lonely because of the rejection she felt due to her own butch androgyny. She believed Solanas was ahead of her time, living in a period before feminist and lesbian activists such as the Guerrilla Girls and the Lesbian Avengers.

Solanas has also been credited with instigating radical feminism. Catherine Lord wrote that "the feminist movement would not have happened without Valerie Solanas". Lord believed that the reissuing of the ''SCUM Manifesto'' and the disowning of Solanas by "women's liberation politicos" triggered a wave of radical feminist publications. According to Vivian Gornick, many of the women's liberation activists who initially distanced themselves from Solanas changed their minds a year later, developing the first wave of radical feminism. At the same time, perceptions of Warhol were transformed from largely nonpolitical into political martyrdom because the motive for the shooting was political, according to Harding and Victor Bockris. Solanas' idiosyncratic views on gender are a focus of Andrea Long Chu's 2019 book, ''Females''.

Fahs describes Solanas as a contradiction that "alienates her from the feminist movement", arguing that Solanas never wanted to be "in movement" but nevertheless fractured the feminist movement by provoking NOW members to disagree about her case. Many contradictions are seen in Solanas' lifestyle as a lesbian who sexually serviced men, her claim to be asexual, a rejection of queer culture, and a non-interest in working with others despite a dependency on others. Fahs also brings into question the contradictory stories of Solanas' life. She is described as a victim, a rebel, and a desperate loner, yet her cousin says she worked as a waitress in her late 20s and 30s, not primarily as a prostitute, and friend Geoffrey LaGear said she had a "groovy childhood". Solanas also kept in touch with her father throughout her life, despite claiming that he sexually abused her. Fahs believes that Solanas embraced these contradictions as a key part of her identity.

In 2018, ''The New York Times'' started a series of delayed obituaries of significant individuals whose importance the paper's obituary writers had not recognized at the time of their deaths. In June 2020, they started a series of obituaries on LGBTQ individuals, and on June 26, they profiled Solanas.

Works

* ''Up Your Ass'' (1965)
* "A Young Girl's Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class", ''Cavalier'' (1966)
* '' SCUM Manifesto'' (1967)

Notes

References

Bibliography

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External links

*
Valerie Solanas The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol)
', by Breanne Fahs (2014)


, by Freddie Baer (1999)
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(), by Alisa Solomon (''The Village Voice'', February 2001)
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Valerie Jean Solanas (1936–88)
' ( Guardian Unlimited, March 2005)
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"The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground"
written June 6, 1968, from ''The Village Voice'' archives.

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