This is a companion piece to Marybeth Hamilton’s article Feminism, Artistry, Madness, and the Ghost of Valerie Solanas which is currently freely available in History Workshop Journal 100.
What entitles a life to a place in the annals of feminist history? Feminist historians practice an ethic of radical inclusion, exploring historical resonance not just in ‘women worthies’, but in the experiences of the marginal and the obscure. But every so often that ethic short circuits: memories of a life stir up bad feeling, and with it an impulse to pull up the drawbridge and shore up the boundaries around feminist terrain.
That act of exclusion propels my article in HWJ 100, Feminism, Artistry, Madness, and the Ghost of Valerie Solanas. It explores the collision between the movement for women’s liberation and a writer and drifter named Valerie Solanas, who crashed into the feminist orbit when she shot and nearly killed the artist Andy Warhol on 3 June 1968. At issue for Solanas was control of her prized manuscript, an incendiary anti-male diatribe called the SCUM Manifesto. After the shooting the Manifesto was published in book form and widely read in feminist circles. Solanas herself was soon confined to a psychiatric prison and became, in the words of one activist, ‘the first icon of the feminist second wave.’
At some point in the decades that followed, that iconic status was rescinded. I discovered as much in 2018, when I read Breanne Fahs’s biography Valerie Solanas while researching an article on the Manifesto’s 50th anniversary. I was struck by how vehemently Solanas’s one-time champions now disavowed her, and how for many of them the movement’s dalliance with Warhol’s assailant had become a source of embarrassment and regret. ‘We were all so very angry’ explained Ti-Grace Atkinson (who once declared the SCUM Manifesto ‘the most important feminist statement to date in the English language’). ‘She seemed to have done something appropriate to the anger we were all feeling, but that was a misreading. She was a glitch. A mistake.’ Jo Freeman, co-founder of the first women’s liberation group in Chicago, was even blunter: ‘She was just crazy. She did nothing but give us a bad name. I think she should just be forgotten, like a bad meal that didn’t go down very well.’
Freeman is not wrong to suggest that association with Solanas has done feminism no favours. If you have ever read anything about Andy Warhol, you will have learned that in 1968 he was shot by an unhinged woman (a ‘demented groupie’ according to one Warhol biographer) who was also a ‘radical feminist’. Clearly, the world sees Solanas as a radical feminist, whatever radical feminists themselves might say about it. It does not help that such statements often appear without explanation, as though linking madness and feminism is somehow self-evident, as though being a radical feminist is inherently irrational, and shooting Andy Warhol is just the kind of wild-eyed, random thing that radical feminists typically do.
But to declare Solanas irrelevant to feminist history on the grounds that she was ‘just crazy’ is to sidestep the fact that it was precisely her craziness that animated the movement’s imagination. Like other radical crusades of the 1960s and 1970s, women’s liberation erupted at a time when progressive writers, artists, and activists versed in the writings of RD Laing, Thomas Szasz, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault viewed madness as a sane response to insane political and social conditions, a coherent and sometimes exalted form of rebellion and protest.
If you have seen the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or read the 1962 novel on which it is based, you will sense what that vision entailed: the mental hospital as distillation of a violently constricting social order in which eccentricity, nonconformity, and radical opposition are stigmatized as ‘insanity’, a system of coercion so all-encompassing that only revolutionary violence could break its grip. As a vision of liberation, it was anarchic and immensely seductive. It was also wildly hostile to women. Think of Nurse Ratched, the sweet-voiced Evil Mother terrorising the cowed male patients; think too of the renegade anti-hero Randall McMurphy, who (in a bit of backstory I confess that I had forgotten) has entered the asylum voluntarily to evade a prison sentence for statutory rape.
Into that misogynistic void swept the author of the SCUM Manifesto, bursting into Warhol’s studio, the Factory, brandishing two guns, an ice pick, and a sanitary pad. For some feminists, who despaired of the incipient movement becoming anything more than ‘a ladies auxiliary of the Left’ (to quote Shulamith Firestone’s acid phrase) the sheer ferocity of that image was thrilling. More startling still was the Manifesto and the incandescent power of Solanas’s voice. ‘Craziness that sounds lucid’ was how it struck the young Esther Newton: a vicious, scatological indictment of men and maleness articulated in a voice of crystalline precision. ‘Icily logical, elegantly comic’, the filmmaker Mary Harron would later write, ‘a strange juxtaposition, as if Oscar Wilde had decided to become a terrorist’.
Around Solanas’s internment in an asylum, activists wove colourful if conflicting stories. Some, like Cell 16 founder Roxanne Dunbar, saw in her the revolutionary fury of Fanon’s starving peasants and argued that she had been driven mad by poverty and exploitation. Others claimed she had been labelled mad, part of the patriarchy’s effort to stem the tide of female unrest. ‘Valerie Solanas is now a political prisoner in a New York mental institution,’ declared Seattle-based activists Sheila Kritchman and Elaine Smith. ‘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’. A few maintained that going mad was an act of existential courage. Faced with the choice all women were offered, between ‘a false and crushing “normality” and a self-destructive but defiant “madness”’, Solanas had chosen defiance. ‘She is a free being. That is the most overwhelming sense I had in her presence’, Dunbar wrote to a friend after visiting Solanas in the asylum. ‘She will die or live in the nuthouse forever before she will waver an inch from her internal freedom’.
Through such stories the movement commandeered her into its ranks, but that inclusion was always equivocal. ‘Let it all hang out’ decreed Robin Morgan in her 1970 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’. ‘Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, Solanisesque, frustrated, crazy …We are the women that men have warned us about.’ Even if Morgan had spelled her name correctly, being “Solanisesque” was not the same as being Solanas. She was enlisted into the movement not as a theorist but as a martyred madwoman, a character in a feminist fable. Like Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath, her life story provided a case study in psychiatric oppression, demonstrating that what gets diagnosed as madness in women is, according to Phyllis Chesler, ‘a socially powerless person’s attempt to unite body and feeling’ by defying patriarchal limits on female autonomy.
That interpretation of madness proved a rich source of feminist thinking – until the 1980s when it came under attack. Some of the criticism came from feminists themselves. As the movement wrestled with internal fractures, cases of burnout and breakdown proved hard to ignore, and while some like Jill Johnston and Kate Millett described their experiences as liberating, others found them excruciating. It was ‘the most painful ordeal I have ever experienced’, wrote Maricla Moyano, ‘a horror trip to be avoided at all costs.’ Adding to that sentiment was a growing backlash across the United States against the theories of anti-psychiatry, which accelerated towards the end of the twentieth century as the social consequences of deinstitutionalization played out. In works of social commentary like the 1982 article ‘Foucault and the Bag Lady’, critics indicted the 1960s and 1970s as an era when radicals embraced crackpot fantasies of liberation through madness, and transformed American streets into a morass of homelessness, addiction, and untreated psychiatric distress.
Amidst all of this, memories of Valerie Solanas grew increasingly discomforting. In the first authoritative histories of the women’s liberation movement (for example works by Alice Echols, Ruth Rosen, and Linda Gordon and Rosalyn Baxandall) its early flirtation with the inflammatory visions of the SCUM Manifesto appears only glancingly where it is mentioned at all.
As for Solanas herself, her final years could have been scripted by the author of ‘Foucault and the Bag Lady’. She was released in 1973 from Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where she had likely been routinely beaten, quite possibly forcibly sterilized, almost certainly continually sedated, and in general, experienced the social consequences of madness in a distinctly non-metaphorical way. After a few years in New York, she moved to Phoenix and then San Francisco, where she joined the ranks of the intermittently homeless, developed an addiction to methamphetamines, and spiralled in and out of psychosis until her death in 1988.
Given the way her life ended, it might be tempting to frame her as a casualty of anti-psychiatry. But that was not the way that Solanas herself saw the story. Before poverty and illness robbed her of lucidity, she was writing her own take on the 1960s and 1970s, a now-lost manuscript that she described as ‘a history of women’s liberation and the New Left.’
For Solanas the universe had wholly upended. Back in 1968 when she was arrested, women’s liberation was a mere fringe insurgency. On her release she found a mass movement, with New York awash with feminist cafes, art galleries, periodicals, and bookstores stocked with feminist tomes, some at the top of the bestseller list.
It was, for her, a Rip Van Winkle moment – but Rip van Winkle with a twist: not only had the world been transformed while she had been locked out it, but that transformation, she was convinced, had been powered by her ideas. Her book was a bid for her proper place in history as the true architect of radical feminism. ‘I think…I’ll call it The Women’s Liberation Movement’s Dirty Little Secret’, she wrote. ‘Excellent. Excellent.’