Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM

by Breanne Fahs

  Meanwhile, Valerie had started to pull away from all support, believing that Maurice would use any legal or media representation of her and SCUM for his own purposes and benefit and that she would lose her case. She wrote to Ti-Grace: “I really don’t care what hospital I go to, because I’m not going to operate at all. My intention is to hole up, start a brand new life at the hospital, push all outsiders out of my mind. The thing is to give Girodias no publicity at all—so how can I operate? . . . SCUM will have its day; it doesn’t have to have it within the next few years.”29

  Nevertheless, Ti-Grace wanted Valerie to have a good lawyer and adequate legal representation. She approached NOW and asked for the organization’s formal support for Valerie’s case. She and several other radical members of NOW wanted to provide Valerie with legal aid and they wanted NOW to back these efforts. Ti-Grace and other NOW lawyers argued that Valerie’s case had a striking similarity to other cases that NOW had supported, particularly cases where women were victimized by either a father or a husband or a mother. While Valerie’s case was not based on a sexual connection, there was an economic motive that Ti-Grace believed NOW should take interest in. She recalled her reasoning: “From the newspapers, the fact that she would not fall into the usual category of sex-related crime, but an economic one, made her crazy. Whereas men killed each other all the time for economic reasons without such a label, women could not do this. This made it, from a legal vantage point, a sex discrimination case on its face that NOW should look into. I thought this was a rather cool assessment. I was coming from another place—all my rage and so on and so forth.”

  When Ti-Grace presented this argument to Valerie, she took issue with this feminist spin on her actions, writing to Judith Brown in October of 1968, “I am not being discriminated against because of sex. That’s a contrived issue designed to give some unimaginative leeches something to rap about.”30 She also sent a letter to Maurice:

  Her [Ti-Grace’s] justification for her statement that I’m discriminated against as a female is females who commit violent acts are sent to bughouses instead of jail. Her ‘proof’ of this is that only 5% of prisoners are female and most patients in bughouses are female. That statement is false, & even if it were true, it doesn’t follow from these 2 statements that a higher % of women than men felons are sent to bughouses. And even if the foregoing were true, it still doesn’t prove that I am being discriminated against; she hasn’t seen the doctors’ report. She (& through her, you), therefore, intends to base a massive case on a false fact & non-sequitor. This is the level of those you align yourself with. Birds of a feather . . .31

  Valerie complained that Maurice tried to get his secretaries and other women at Olympia Press to talk to her, retorting, “The soul sisters are few & far between, & you wouldn’t run into them anyway, as you don’t travel in soul circles. If you want to know what I’m thinking or up to, ask me yourself, you sniveling coward.”32

  FRACTURING FEMINISM

  Sweetie, if you’re not living on the edge, then you’re taking up space.

  —Florynce Kennedy

  I had to stand completely still to avoid going to pieces. . . . Blue smoke between the trunks. Frost on all the trees. White burning witches. Millett. Atkinson. Brownmiller. Firestone. Solanas. Davis. Morgan. Steinem. Dead potted plants in every window.

  —Sara Stridsburg, The Dream Faculty

  Disagreements about how to proceed with Valerie’s case led to major fractures within NOW. (As Valerie wrote to Maurice the year after the shooting, “N.O.W. is now P.A.S.T.”)33 Liberal feminists argued that they should stay far away from her case, as they did not want feminism associated with violence and extreme anger. Many radical feminists argued in impassioned ways about how Valerie represented the crystallization of women’s rage and that they must stand up against the double standard placed on violent women compared to violent men. Radical feminists believed NOW must stand up against men’s nearly constant victimization of women and, perhaps, Valerie represented an effective way to bring this mistreatment into the public eye. Radicals also suggested that NOW should support all women, regardless of the extremity of their actions.

  The tide of feminism had turned, and radical camps had formed in many places. Roxanne had arrived in Boston to form, or find, a female liberation movement. She had assembled a group that later acquired the name Cell 16, and they read the SCUM Manifesto as sacred text while laughing hilariously at Valerie’s wicked satire. This group emulated Valerie by writing and selling their propaganda on the streets of Cambridge and Boston, even charging men for conversation as Valerie had done. They picketed the new Playboy Club, studied martial arts, and roamed the streets of Boston in groups, daring men to be offensive.

  Groups had started to form in Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. After linking up with several of them, Roxanne and Dana arrived uninvited (though they did not know this!) to an invitation-only, three-day planning meeting for the National Women’s Liberation Conference in Sandy Springs, Maryland. The women at the meeting, though all self-described militants, “cowered at the thought that their feminism might make them be perceived as ‘man-haters.’”34 Roxanne decided that “those groovy women needed a little consciousness-raising so we filibustered, disrupting their rigid agenda and calm discussions with select readings from SCUM Manifesto.”35 They caused a big controversy when, as feminist Charlotte Bunch recalled, they read aloud excerpts from SCUM Manifesto. In fact, Roxanne believed Valerie’s contribution to feminism was so substantial that she and others of Cell 16 read aloud from SCUM Manifesto as the group’s “first order of business.” With Ti-Grace calling SCUM Manifesto the “most important feminist statement written to date in the English language,” Valerie’s text had become close to required reading among radical feminists within months of the shooting.36

  Roxanne was adamant that Valerie’s voice would be heard, pleading in a July 5, 1968, letter to her then boyfriend, “Valerie’s is a voice in the wilderness shouting her rebellion, saying she will accept no arguments to the contrary, allow no loopholes or fancy devices that could be used to counter her argument. She is EVERYWOMAN in some basic sense. She is my mother and other broken and destroyed women, a martyr for all women everywhere. In that way she is not so different from Che. Read her manifesto closely. She wants us to see, not a new man, but a new human being created, and now.”37

  Like Ti-Grace, Roxanne was outraged that Valerie did not automatically receive support from mainstream feminist groups, particularly NOW:

  It seemed to me like the most obvious thing in the world that we would defend Valerie Solanas. After all, she wrote her manifesto and had made points we just couldn’t ignore. It’s maybe not what we would have chosen, but you don’t get to choose everything that happens when an issue bursts forth. It would be like rejecting Malcolm X because he was too radical or he was a Muslim or he’s about “by any means necessary” ideology. I thought Valerie could really be an amazing “reader” of things, or a person who would speak out more radically than anyone else because now that she shot Warhol, she couldn’t go back on her radicalism.38

  Rosalyn Baxandall, another radical feminist living in New York City and interested in Valerie’s case, also felt moved by Valerie’s story and had organized a radical feminist group called W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) to picket outside Valerie’s trial at the courthouse between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in midtown Manhattan. Rosalyn remembered that they had seminars in which they read sections of SCUM Manifesto aloud in a group: “Valerie was particularly appealing to W.I.T.C.H. because of her provocativeness in the Emma Goldman tradition of will and action. I always hated Andy Warhol.” Rosalyn felt connected to Valerie’s rage and angry about dismissive characterizations of her as simply “crazy.” She said, “I saw Valerie as a feminist issue and I felt that she was cheated by having to deal with these horrible men. Some people said she was crazy but I thought she was very sane. A lot of people were supposedly crazy like All
en Ginsberg and people who had been put in mental institutions weren’t crazy at all. They were telling the truth. People who didn’t conform were always being labeled as crazy then.” Having worked at Max’s Kansas City where Andy hung out, Rosalyn observed, “He was just so arrogant with his clique of men who just thought they were so superior.”39

  Laura X, a radical feminist who would go on to lead the efforts to categorize marital rape as a criminal offense, also felt admiration for and an alliance with Valerie, using Valerie’s words and stories to further radicalize her own politics:

  I did not believe in killing people, but like Malcolm X, I thought her analysis was exactly right. All of us understood her analysis of the relations between the sexes; many just chose to live our lives in a different way. People in early women’s lib movement passed the SCUM Manifesto around with great interest and appreciation. It had great resonance with our lives. Valerie Solanas wanted to go against all men; we wanted to go another way, but we understood the betrayal of the men in the civil rights movement. When we combined that with the experience of the women from the suburbs, we had quite a group assembling for the march down 5th Avenue. Whether or not a woman ever again touched a hair on a man’s head, all agreed with her analysis of how men treated women, even if they were philosophically opposed to how she dealt with it.40

  As one who would later join New York Radical Women, Carol Hanisch also felt sympathy for Valerie, claiming that her radical friends felt angry that Andy promised Valerie things and did not do them. “We felt that she had a legitimate gripe with him—a male ripping off a woman. We felt like defending her against him, or at least not totally dismissing her.” Carol felt that SCUM Manifesto had a dramatic impact on radical feminists, in that “the passion and outrageousness of it let others be more passionate and outrageous. Some saw truth in the discussion of how men act.”41

  Anne Koedt, another founder of radical feminism, characterized Valerie’s influence by emphasizing Valerie’s willingness to express anger toward men: “So many women were afraid to be angry. Her coming out as angry was probably healthy, as it let other women come out as angry.” Still, Anne feared that Valerie would distort the true goals of feminism and that the press picked her up only so they could dismiss her as a crazy lesbian man hater: “She was one of the prototypes picked up to discredit the movement.” Speaking of her interactions with Valerie prior to the shooting, Anne recalled, “She struck me as one who self-destructed in a blaze—I could see it early. She had a very driven quality, but she seemed self-destructive. She was more ‘I’m angry,’ not ‘we’re angry.’ She had a lonely rage.”42

  Valerie’s rage, however lonely, did strike a chord with many radical feminists of the time. A pamphlet that circulated titled Feminism Lives! labeled Valerie as a political prisoner and provided more evidence that radical feminists defended her cause. The pamphlet read:

  She isn’t there, as is commonly thought, directly for any criminal activity, but so that men in power can convince themselves she is insane and/or force her to shut up, and to show all women the political consequences of speaking their minds before men, or of any attempt by women to define ourselves. . . . This woman, with a single book, has done as much to bring the cause of women’s liberation before the public as all the activist groups combined. “Valerie Lives!” is a cry being heard more often, in one form or another, from the mouths of affluent women to the etchings on public walls.43

  As president of NOW during this time, Ti-Grace caught heat for siding with, and nurturing, the radical factions. “I was being raked over the coals,” she recalled. She continued:

  They tried to impeach me as president of NOW for going to [Valerie’s] aid at all. It’s sort of like a Rorschach test, Valerie was. Betty Friedan, before I became a threat to her, was once very supportive and confiding. I remember she was really in a fix once because she had a place on Fire Island with her husband and they had a big fight. She chased him down the beach with a carving knife screaming she was going to cut it off. Lots of people saw her and he was going to bring this up in divorce proceedings. She asked me what to do and I told her, “Well, there were witnesses, so what can you do? You’ve got to brazen it out and just say, ‘I’m a passionate woman. What do you want from me?’” I thought that was good advice. So when Betty flipped out at my assertion that there was a connection between violence and feminism, I thought of her chasing her husband down the beach with a carving knife. She’s telling me I’m crazy.

  Betty wanted nothing to do with Valerie’s case, writing to Ti-Grace, “I don’t like the politics of this,” and sending telegrams to Flo that read, for example, “DESIST IMMEDIATELY FROM LINKING NOW IN ANY WAY WITH VALERIE SOLANAS. MISS SOLANAS MOTIVES IN WARHOL CASE ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT TO NOW’S GOALS OF FULL EQUALITY FOR WOMEN IN TRULY EQUAL PARTNERSHIP WITH MEN.” Flo responded with “Valerie is superior to many of the people in NOW. She already says Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Genet are overrated windbags so you can imagine what she thinks of NOW. She’s worth all the NOW members put together. That’s right!”44

  Despite the clear support shown by Ti-Grace and Flo for Valerie during her early days at Elmhurst Hospital, Valerie soon wanted nothing to do with them. Flo had pleaded with Valerie to work with her to secure her release, warning that she would likely be sent to Matteawan, a New York State hospital for the so-called criminally insane and known colloquially as a snake pit. Valerie resisted. Ultimately, Valerie’s resistance and stubborn refusal to cooperate led Flo to resign as her lawyer. Flo, following several weeks of Valerie’s bad behavior toward her, expressed her fury to Ti-Grace: “I don’t let anybody abuse me.” But Ti-Grace stayed on, however dismal the prospects seemed, giving Valerie money, visiting often, and trying to gather support for her legal case.

  Once Valerie did arrive at Matteawan, her rejection of help from feminists ebbed and she began casting a wide net to seek assistance. She pleaded for Roxanne Dunbar, Wilda Holt, Ti-Grace, and Geoffrey LeGear to visit her, writing to Roxanne, “Please visit me as soon as possible at Matteawan. It’s very important. . . . If Ti-Grace is willing, I’d like to see her too. . . . I’d like to have a long, long talk with Ti-Grace. Maybe at Matteawan, as the visiting time lasts longer + we can visit in person at a table instead of through these things, we can finally straighten out a lot of matters. I’d love to do so, if she’s willing. . . . Please, all of you, visit me as soon as possible.”45 She contacted several NOW members, including Betty Friedan and Jacqueline “Jacqui” Ceballos. Jacqui recalled that Valerie called her several times from prison, sounding angry, wanting NOW to help her: “I said, ‘How can I help you? I am just a member of NOW first of all. You have to go through the board. You can’t just say to NOW, ‘We’re helping her.’ We were trying to do serious work. We couldn’t be distracted by all this. The press would skewer us. I mean, I think Valerie is a wonderful person and you know my heart really goes out to her, but she was not working for feminism. She was working for Valerie Solanas. She shot the guy in the balls. And besides, she sounded crazy. I never heard from her until months later when she was moved.”46

  Indeed, NOW had blocked all efforts to help Valerie, a move that alarmed radical feminists. Mary Eastwood wrote a memo to Betty Friedan (sending copies to Muriel Fox and Delores Alexander) arguing that NOW should defend Valerie, as NOW and the American Civil Liberties Union had supported other “assassins” and “robbers” despite those groups’ stance against the types of crimes these individuals had been accused of: “Human rights is for everybody, even those who oppose us. If we select out those who disagree with us the sincerity of our principles is suspect. . . . If there was a sex discrimination issue involved, NOW might at least protest even though we can’t afford to take on any other cases yet.”47

  NOW still refused to help Valerie, viewing her as outside the feminist movement and saying she gave feminism a bad name. In protest of this decision, Robin Morgan organized a petition to raise funds for Valerie’s release to a private institution w
here she would receive better care.48 Roxanne found fault with how NOW members rejected Valerie’s brilliance because of Valerie’s mental illness. “The objections to her were that it would give our nascent movement a bad reputation to defend someone who is crazy. At that time, crazy seemed like a pretty relative term. In 1968, the exact definition of crazy, with the government killing a hundred thousand Vietnamese every month, it just seemed like an odd argument for leftist people. That’s the same logic they used against wanting lesbians in NOW—it would give them a ‘bad reputation.’”49 Valerie, then, posed a triple threat: she looked like a dyke and she was crazy and she was violent. She was NOW’s worst nightmare.

  Around the time that Valerie contacted members of NOW and directly asked for help, she also sent a letter to Ti-Grace pleading for her and Flo to visit and help her. Ti-Grace was outraged by this because Valerie had got her into serious trouble with Betty already:

  She wanted the support of somebody like Betty Friedan so she wrote Betty Friedan and said I was harassing her and would Betty tell me that I had to leave her alone. There was a national board meeting and Betty and I by this time were really at loggerheads. Betty had already been behind an attempt to impeach me for having been in the courtroom with Valerie, and of course Betty despised Valerie, so I’m sitting next to Betty and she starts frothing, saying I belong to this “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and she has this letter from a woman that says I’m harassing her. Well, I was shocked. People are making accusations that I’m carrying knives around. I got up and threw my handbag on the table and said, “Take a look inside! This is absurd!” So I get home from this meeting and there’s a wire from Valerie asking me to help her and I’m really pissed with her at this point, big time.