Valerie Solanas

Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist known for her attempted assassination of artist Andy Warhol in 1968.

Solanas appeared in Warhol's film I, a Man (1967) and self-published the SCUM Manifesto, a possibly satirical pamphlet calling for the extinction of men. She believed Warhol was conspiring with her publisher, Maurice Girodias, to prevent her work from being published. On June 3, 1968, Solanas shot Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya at the Factory, Warhol's studio in Manhattan. She was charged with attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a firearm, and subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to three years in prison. After her release, she was arrested again for aggravated assault in 1971 after threatening editors Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan of Grove Press. She was then institutionalized several times. Solanas continued to promote the SCUM Manifesto and was an editor for the biweekly feminist magazine Majority Report before drifting into obscurity. She became destitute and died of pneumonia in 1988.

Early life and education

Solanas was born on April 9, 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 to parents who had emigrated 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's mother sent her to be raised by her grandparents in 1949. Solanas reported that her grandfather was a violent alcoholic who often beat her. At fifteen, 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 openly lesbian at this time, despite the conservative cultural climate of the 1950s.

Solanas subsequently 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 the University of California, Berkeley for a few courses. It was during this time that she began writing the SCUM Manifesto.

Early years in New York City

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 artist Andy Warhol at his Manhattan studio, the Factory, and asked him to produce Up Your Ass. Warhol 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 found it so vulgar that he suspected Solanas might be an undercover police officer planting obscene material as part of an entrapment operation. Solanas later contacted Warhol about the script; when she was told that he had lost it, she started demanding money from him. He offered to pay her $25 to appear in his film I, a Man (1967), in order to pay her rent at the Hotel Chelsea.

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 1967 film Bike Boy.

SCUM Manifesto

In 1967, Solanas self-published her best-known work, the SCUM Manifesto. It places blame on men for the ills of humankind and urges women to "overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex".

Some authors have argued that the manifesto is a parody or satire of patriarchy and have compared it to Jonathan Swift's 1729 satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal. Solanas described herself as "a social propagandist" according to Harding, and 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 Hotel Chelsea, 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 between Warhol and Girodias to steal her work was behind Warhol's failure to return the Up Your Ass script.

Shooting of Andy Warhol

On June 3, 1968, 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, Solanas 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.

Around 8 p.m. that same day, Solanas walked up to a policeman at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 47th Street near Times Square and turned herself in, telling the officer that Warhol "had too much control in my life". She was booked and fingerprinted at the 13th Precinct; 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."