"Every man, deep down, knows he's a worthless piece of shit."

- Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

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American radical feminist, founder of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men) and author of the Scum Manifesto. Valerie Solanas was born in Atlantic City. In spite of her disrupted childhood, a rebellious school career and having a baby at the age of 15 which was adopted, Solanas graduated from high school in 1954 and enrolled to take psychology at the University of Maryland. Her father's desertion of her as a child has been offered as one explanation for her subsequent hatred of all men. She claimed to be paying her way through college by prostitution but also had a job in an experimental laboratory where she found the 'scientific proof ' to back the theories put forward in the Scum Manifesto - ie that the male is a biological accident, an incomplete female with one y gene which is an incomplete x. She then enrolled on a masters programme at the University of Minnesota in 1958, but dropped out early in 1959 claiming that there was nothing there of relevance to women and all the research places and professorships were for men. She went to Berkeley and took a few courses, which is where she started writing the articulate, angry and funny Scum Manifesto which advocates wiping out men altogether, the self-propagation of women by test tube and the stamping out of the patriarchal society in which passive women collude.

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rom 1960 Solanas lived on the New York streets, cynically selling her body, which she knew was a reliable source of income. She had always hoped that Andy Warhol would help make her famous by publishing her writings - although in fact her plays were too outrageous even for him and his group. He gave her a part in one of his films, I, a Man, paying her $25 to buy her off. Frustrated and infuriated by his lack of action on her behalf and his cruelty towards her, and in the grip of a paranoia which developed into schizophrenia, she shot him in 1968 (not fatally) and gained brief fame.

 

Solanas held her views alone and by the time there were feminist networks in place to appreciate her work, she had moved on to further extremes. In 1996, a film, I Shot Andy Warhol, was made of her life which challenges the accepted view of her as a deranged and vengeful lesbian, and presents a brilliant and passionate woman thwarted by mental instability and abusive relationships. In 1988 San Francisco police broke into her room in a welfare hostel because she was behind with her rent, and found her maggot-ridden body.

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Biography courtesy of The Guardian