Burdened with a defective genetic structure (the y chromosome being a fragmented x), the male (an “incomplete female," a “walking abortion”) harbored a pathological longing for core female qualities (“emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc”). Supporting herself through prostitution and begging, she set out to become a writer, penning a satirical play titled Up Your Ass and fleshing out a set of ideas about women and men that she had been incubating since the mid-1950s into a call to arms that she called her Manifesto.Īt the core of the Manifesto was a kind of inverted Freudianism. For a time she flirted with graduate training (including a job in an animal research lab) before dropping out of education, drifting across the country, and arriving in New York in 1962. Eventually her sharp intelligence won her a place at the University of Maryland, where in 1958 she earned an honors degree in psychology. Born in 1936 to a working-class New Jersey family, Solanas experienced physical and sexual abuse from her father and grandfather, bore two children before the age of fifteen, began to identify as a lesbian, and attended school erratically in between occasional stints on the streets. The SCUM Manifesto was the product of years of rumination by a woman living on the margins.
First produced as a mimeograph in 1967 (Solanas sold it on the streets of New York, charging fifty cents for women and one dollar for men), the Manifesto appeared in book form in August 1968, two months after its author made headlines for her near-fatal shooting of Andy Warhol, who she believed was stealing her work. Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.įerocious, deranged, hilarious, and exhilarating, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto set out the agenda of the Society for Cutting Up Men, a revolutionary organization of which Solanas was the founder and sole member. First published at History Workshop Online.
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