Valerie Solanas: A Socialist Utopia Through Radical Feminism

Hannah McCormick-Hill

Trigger warning: domestic abuse, misandry.

On the 3rd of June 1968, Valerie Solanas entered the Decker Building in New York City and fired a single bullet through the body of the famed artist, Andy Warhol. When questioned by journalists as to why she committed such an act, her response was ‘Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am’. The manifesto mentioned by Solanas was SCUM, a self-published manifesto which would, in recent years, become something of a cult classic among contemporary feminists. SCUM, which was once thought to have stood for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’ was a radical feminist manifesto which called for the worldwide overthrow of male-dominated systems. Solanas’ manifesto is wildly provocative in nature and advocates for the violent eradication of the male species through societal anarchy.

At times Solanas’ manifesto can seem humorous or satirical in tone, through statements like ‘To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo’. However, the overall goal of her manifesto is one that is not so facetious, her goal is to make our society a fully automated one, a society where the ‘money system’ has been abolished and the government has been overthrown. In order to achieve this, Solanas argues that men must be eradicated. A good chunk of Solanas’ manifesto is dedicated to the critique of men, devaluing them in comparison to women, hence misandry is central to its premise. In this way, SCUM is often read as a mere hate campaign against men, a manifesto of little value containing the ramblings of a crazed man-hating woman. For example, some statements are extreme in nature, such as, ‘the male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live’. However, Solanas elaborates further on her political motivations throughout the manifesto. The purpose of SCUM is to motivate women to withdraw from the labour force, and to paralyse the world’s economy. She urges women to ‘stop buying’ and instead loot and disrupt the systems in place. Solanas saw SCUM as a motivational text for female rebellion, not only inciting women to rebel against the patriarchal forces dominating our society, but to rebel against the capitalistic structures, we exist within. Although Solanas’ writing is shrouded in problematic content, the underlining goals of her feminist manifesto were ones of a socialist origin. If we are to return to Solanas’ statement, ‘Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am’ it is fair to assume then that Solanas was not only a radical feminist but a radical socialist too.

However, it is important to peer further into who Valerie Solanas was, aside from her revolutionary thinking, to understand where her political standpoint may have originated from. In 1951, at the age of fifteen, Solanas left home due to abuse at the hands of her father and grandfather. Despite her vulnerable state, Solanas managed to put herself through school and studied at the University of Maryland. In order to achieve financial independence Solanas resorted to begging and prostitution to support herself in adulthood. Eventually, she would land herself in the heart of New York City, soaking up its culture while writing plays and political pieces, such as the SCUM manifesto. A significant play which Solanas would write in 1965, provocatively named Up Your Ass, was a play in which a man-hating prostitute and a beggar would kill men. It was this play that would eventually lead to her association with Warhol and her eventual attack. Although it may be easy to look at the events throughout Solanas’ life and jot her political standpoint down to her abuse or negative interactions with men, perhaps it is instead more useful to look at the political context of her writing.

Solanas was a woman who was often homeless and worked as a sex worker. These are two positions within a western capitalist society which are both neglected and targeted by its economic and political systems, especially in the 1960s. Thus, Solanas was shaped into the revolutionist thinker she came to be through her experiences within these oppressive positions. Her position as a disadvantaged woman within a capitalist society undoubtedly influenced the anti-capitalist views she expressed in the SCUM manifesto. Not only this, but Solanas lived throughout the era of second-wave feminism and the feminist liberation movement; themes of which can largely be seen throughout the SCUM manifesto. A major element of the women’s liberation movement was provoking the public, in order to make society aware of issues that women faced. It is then possible to understand the provocative nature of SCUM as a deliberate action to draw attention to the revolutionary ideas Solanas was campaigning for. However, Solanas’ later attack on Warhol suggests her provocation in SCUM was not solely an empty threat. Though SCUM was produced at the beginning of second-wave feminism, the socialist feminist influences of this second-wave can be seen within Solanas’ writing.

Whilst Valerie Solanas is most often remembered for her shooting of one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, her revolutionary thinking is still profoundly important to this day. SCUM and its renewed popularity in the 21st century is a prime example of how socialism and feminism have historically been theoretically intertwined and continue to be as such, to this day.