Valerie Solanas

“Darling, she’s furious. You have to spell her name correctly,” cautioned Florynce Kennedy, speaking to the press. “It’s Solanas. S-O-L-A-N-A-S. Not Solanis. She’s tired of you writers misspelling her name.”1 Perhaps more than any of her many other identities, Valerie Solanas identified as a provocateur. Known for her fierce anger and humor, she pushed, prodded, and provoked her way through the history of the women’s movement, even posthumously. Whether her actions had revolutionary potential—or whether they signified personal torment and despair—provoked intense debate following her shooting of Andy Warhol.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, leader of the radical feminist group Cell 16, once astutely said of Valerie, “Perhaps destroyers like her can never transform their energy but only inspire others.”2 Or, as librarian Donny Smith believed:

She scared other women, and not just with her ideas. She looked like a dyke and often identified herself as one, loudly. She refused to hold a regular job, and her panhandling and prostitution made it all too obvious how dependent a woman was on the male-dominated economy for “nurture and feed.” She could be hostile, arrogant, and condescending, and was full of panics, anxieties, and paranoias. She had no patience for politicking. She considered her manifesto the last word on feminism and any further discussion was either plagiarism or “bullshit.” She was in no way qualified to be a revolutionary or a feminist leader.3

Still, Valerie found her way, albeit unwillingly, into the center of the emerging feminist movement, helping to transform it and break it apart.

A Climate for Women’s Rage Grows

While the hand’s rocking the cradle it won’t be rocking the boat.

—Valerie Solanas, Up Your Ass

While Valerie never officially aligned with any organizations in the swelling collective anger arising from the late 1960s women’s movement, her ideas and actions played a role in the trajectory of this collective challenge to patriarchy. Prior to the Warhol shootings and the publication of SCUM Manifesto, a climate for women’s rage had started growing across the United States, particularly in New York City. The government tailored women’s rights according to their marital status, refused to recognize women as independent from men, and defined nearly all aspects of social life in paternalistic terms—women needed protection, engaged in caretaking, and held traditional social and sexual values to affirm their femininity. Women were getting increasingly fed up with this—particularly as they noticed how many more privileges and rights men had secured—giving new momentum to a collective, growing sense of women’s rage.

The epicenter of anger was the issue of abortion, as the government blocked basic measures to protect women’s health and safety during unwanted pregnancy. Radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson described this vividly:

Drip, drip, drip. It was all over, all over, just all over. Women couldn’t sit in first class on the plane without a man with them. Trivial, but constant. Women couldn’t open their own bank accounts without a male signature. I was the first elected president for New York NOW and I had the telephone for NOW in my home. You could always tell an abortion call before they said a thing. The voice was humiliated and tentative—awful, awful, awful, just a disaster. People were calling all day every day about their abortion experiences. It was their humiliation, that these women had to call a stranger and they always had complications. They were always further along than they could admit even to themselves. They never had any money. The people doing the abortions were, for the most part, crazy. Many of the women got raped on the tables. It was really heavy, sick, sick, sick, heavy stuff. I mean, you have to understand how women were hated. Just remembering now, it’s hard.4

The National Organization for Women, founded in 1966 by twenty-eight women who had attended the Third National Conference for the Commission on the Status of Women, sprang up in response to the growing concerns about women’s institutionalized powerlessness. Seeking to establish a base of like-minded women committed to equality, NOW recruited a number of women to its ranks, including Ti-Grace Atkinson and Betty Friedan, both of whom NOW eventually appointed as leaders (Betty as president of NOW, Ti-Grace as chapter president). Both within and outside of NOW, women started to organize around the issue of abortion, reaching across class and race lines and joining together to fight back. Ti-Grace reveled in the diverse interest women showed for NOW: “They were terrific. We looked different. We dressed differently. We lived in different parts of New York. The intensity of interest in feminism was primary and we were ready to go for broke. None of us cared what it took. We wanted out. We wanted this.” From Shirley Chisholm to Pauli Murray, NOW included a wide swath of women interested in fighting patriarchy. Shulamith “Shulie” Firestone, a writer and painter, and Anne Koedt, a commercial artist, joined Ti-Grace and numerous others to form a game plan of how to address the issue of abortion. As Ti-Grace had said, “I have long understood that the only way to reach people on feminism is to go for that aspect that is their jugular.”5

NOW initially wanted to sponsor an abortion reform law (one that would later become the basis for current debates about abortion) specifying the rights of the mother versus the rights of the fetus. Ti-Grace remembered pleading with others, “Don’t do that. You’re basing it around the fetus and you’re leaving that wide open. It can be manipulated. You’ve got to take all of the laws off the books and say it’s simply a medical procedure. It’s between a woman and her doctor. Otherwise, you’re in serious trouble.” The “reform” feminists like most of those in NOW tried to assure the “repeal” feminists like Ti-Grace, Cindy Cisler, and others that the right to privacy represented a sound basis for abortion and they could get more radical later. Ti-Grace knew better: “It doesn’t work that way. This was our shot and we had to get it right then. You have to get rights based on the right grounds. . . . That’s the difference between liberal and radical feminists. What is the difference between people who are satisfied with the mainstream and people that aren’t? Part of it is how they see themselves. I believe women are a class, and I wanted a revolution.”

Throughout 1968, NOW members continued to block efforts to radicalize the abortion debate, standing firm in their view that the right to privacy argument would best advance feminist principles while giving women the freedom to seek abortion. Growing frustrations within NOW about this issue began to splinter the group. “Everybody in NOW said they wanted a revolution,” said Ti-Grace. “Everybody wanted a revolution. I didn’t know anybody who didn’t want a revolution and I couldn’t understand why every time it came to an action, we would have big fights even though we all said we wanted the same thing.” Eventually, NOW determined that they would petition for abortion based on the right to privacy rather than the more radical approach to decriminalize abortion altogether.

Radical feminists within NOW decided that, in order to undermine sexist ideologies about women, marriage should be the next target. Ti-Grace recalled, “They weren’t going to go after that. They’d say, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and sort of agree with you on the surface, but when you talked about doing something about it, there was no way.” The late 1960s inundated women with propaganda and brainwashing about the importance of marriage, the necessity of finding and keeping a man. Ti-Grace joked about her own perceptions: “I realized at seventeen that, gee, I’m going downhill. The wedding is the high point of your life. That seemed rather depressing and odd to me. I do remember being overwhelmed in the late ’60s by the perception that instead of being a treasured part of the universe, I was a piece of shit and was just going to be used and abandoned.” (And, indeed, there were no categories for acts like “marital rape” until 1976, as the State saw women as men’s property.)

In addition to problems within NOW, radical women felt marginalized by men in both the new and old Left, who rarely challenged notions that women should provide sexual and domestic labor to men. As Dana Densmore, member of radical feminist group Cell 16, said, “People that were really counterculture did not have any investment in changing gender roles. The women that were involved were getting an incredible education in the tension between what we were looking for, what we were putting our lives on the line for, and how badly we were being treated by those very organizations and the men of those organizations.” Men on the left, especially socialists, felt threatened by the idea of women holding them accountable. “Just our refusal to go along with prescribed categories was so threatening,” Dana recalled, “and the reaction so violent (I don’t just mean physical violence), that we received constant threats. The implication is that, ‘We will fight back, as if our testicles were on the line.’”6 Dana felt that women’s lives were at stake, that their radical feminist politics were no joking matter—a conflict that later inspired the radical feminist journal No More Fun and Games, published from 1968 to 1973.

In particular, sexual politics rose up as a hotly contested issue, as women tried to communicate, as Ti-Grace said, that “someone can be all for sex, and still not find being objectified sexy.” The climate around women fighting back, fighting the Right, fighting within the Left, and fighting each other became the dominant narrative of late 1960s feminism.

The Crystallization of Rage

In almost any woman you can unearth an incredible fury. It is often not even conscious, a threshold thing. But it’s there, and it’s an anger that can be a powerful radicalizing force.

—Bernadine Dohrn7

NOW kept having internal fights over goals and tactics, and, as Ti-Grace said, “Valerie was one of these fights. There was so much violence. You kept hearing things about how many women got killed. Battering was starting to come up and it was being talked about. Women were just the victims every place, and if you didn’t want to be a victim, but you saw all of this, it was just overwhelming. Real rage.” Ti-Grace first heard about the SCUM Manifesto only one day prior to Valerie’s shooting Andy Warhol. Ti-Grace received a call at her home from a Village Voice writer named Rosetta Reitz, a radical feminist and eventual founder of a jazz label, who had allowed Valerie to live with her (Ti-Grace rightly noted, “Valerie always needed a place to live”), asking if she had heard about this document—SCUM Manifesto—and mentioning that it would interest the feminist movement. Rosetta said that she feared Valerie’s instability, as Valerie had been violent toward her, and said she did not want to live with her anymore. Still, she thought SCUM Manifesto had compelling qualities that would speak to the growing women’s movement.

The following day, Ti-Grace saw the news coverage of the shooting and noted that the shooter had told the press, “He had too much control over my life.” Valerie had unwittingly found some new allies. “Well, the first thing I thought was that Warhol is not exactly the exemplar you choose for male supremacy,” Ti-Grace admitted. “He was asexual, so I knew it wasn’t some personal relationship. This was right after the big New York Times piece on feminism (and a lot on me) so everybody was aware that there was this anger building around them. The Times presented the shooting as if Valerie was somehow connected with feminism. All I saw was: she had shot Warhol. I knew there was exploitation and it matched because finally some woman had done something that was appropriate to the feelings we were having. She was fighting back. That’s what it felt like.”

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz felt similarly moved by hearing the news of Valerie’s expression of rage. Having spent time working with Martin Luther King, Jr. and various Black Panthers, she felt increasingly distant from peaceful strategies of social change. Sitting in a café in Mexico City, she had read the headline “Super-Woman Power Advocate Shoots Andy Warhol” and decided to leave Mexico immediately, eager to be a part of “that delicious moment, that exciting, formative time.”8 When she thought about Valerie’s shooting Andy and standing up to patriarchy, she began fantasizing about Valerie as a symbol of women’s rage. “I would go to the United States to launch this revolution with this superwoman ideology and also find Valerie. Because I had come out of four years of graduate study in history, I thought Boston was symbolically and historically a perfect place. I started calling everyone I knew. We would organize to defend Valerie and we would take the whole ‘Free Huey’ movement as a model to create this ‘Free Valerie’ movement. Everyone was always copying everyone so it’s hard to get a new idea. I was tired of playing the ‘Who’s more oppressed’ games in the South and wanted a change.”9 Roxanne became concerned with who would represent Valerie legally, knowing how pivotal legal representation can be in times of social crisis.

Kate Millett, radical feminist author of Sexual Politics, was perplexed by the news that Valerie had shot Andy, saying that before the shooting, “SCUM [Manifesto] was taken by many as similar to Swift’s Modest Proposal. . . . It was such an extreme statement—that’s why it caused so much consternation and argument.” There were lots of arguments happening about SCUM Manifesto and “the argument was very impassioned.”10 Once Valerie shot Andy, SCUM was no longer mere rhetoric. “No one really thought there was a SCUM group. That was part of its ironical literary quality. It is like books being purported to come from or be found in people’s drawers—it had a spurious origin. I saw its rhetorical quality before the shooting—after, I couldn’t see it the same way.”

Kate described Valerie as a fascinating case: “a female artist driven to terrible lengths by the response—or lack of response—of the art world around her, and then finally lashing out in this way against the superhero or leader of the avant-garde. You can see its symbolic level here as someone who writes a feminist manifesto so extreme that most feminists are horrified.” SCUM brimmed with sarcasm but never represented why she shot Andy. Kate told a story: “There was once a suffragette who threw herself under a horse at Ascot in a desperate attempt to get the attention of government so that women would get the vote.” She continued, “The shooting was like that. I don’t think it meant that one had to go shoot someone to be consistent with SCUM’s notions.” Kate was touched and fascinated by the whole incident: “It had meaning to me, the way she seemed to represent frustration as the woman artist ignored, driven to a kind of revenge.” In NOW at that time, as Kate suggested, women faced pressures about “respectability”: “Don’t be a lesbian or be called dykes at marches. . . . In NOW they were trying to define themselves away from Valerie. The shooting and its impetus were familiar to a great many. Maybe that’s why it made people so uneasy. Ti-Grace, in being very kind to her, took a lot of flak from the leadership of NOW. She was compassionate by nature, and suffered as a result.”

On hearing about Valerie’s arrest for the Warhol shootings, Ti-Grace had an impulse to immediately leave her apartment and head toward the courthouse. As Kate noted, “It was very much like Ti-Grace to take an interest in Valerie because she was so radical. She was a philosopher—she liked the radical, the irrational—she was very smart and very thoughtful. It was very courageous of her to do it.” At the time of the shooting, Ti-Grace was helping many women get illegal abortions and people had told her that she would be thrown in jail for it. “I can’t live with myself if I don’t do what I can,” Ti-Grace admitted. “So I raced down and who do I see coming up the steps in criminal court? Florynce Kennedy! Flo and I by then had the same instincts. Her feeling was, like any black person she saw going into the judicial system, ‘They’re going to be in trouble. They needed help.’ She was on her way. We were both on our way.”

Flo, a prominent civil rights attorney and reputable badass, had represented numerous Black Panthers and knew that people in prison needed money coming in from the outside and needed to make it clear to fellow inmates that they had people who cared about them on the outside. Flo brought legal savvy to Valerie while Ti-Grace brought empathy, solidarity, and support. “It didn’t really have to do with who she was or what was going on,” Ti-Grace said. “I visited her in prison to see what I could do to help. What did she need? Was she alone? I gathered from this other call I had that she didn’t have a big crowd around her.”

Flo agreed to represent Valerie pro bono; both she and Ti-Grace were granted the right to visit Valerie in prison soon after the shooting. Flo recounted to the East Village Other:

Valerie hasn’t lost weight. She looks darling . . . looks very good . . . seems to be taking it okay. The average person, you know, is very anxious to get out. Not Valerie! To her the whole world is a nuthouse and she’s sheltered from the craziness. The whole world is a garbage pail. There is no pressure now. I tell you, Valerie was in fairly good spirits. She’s a damn good fighter. She wants to defend herself. Yes, she doesn’t want any legal aid. I took the position that she was very intelligent and best able to fight for herself. One of the best things the oppressor likes is for you to put up a big struggle, and is put off balance when you don’t.11

Flo advised Valerie to keep responses to the press brief and Valerie did so, giving only short answers about her defense, insisting that “SCUM Manifesto will be my entire defense.” To “Doing any writing?” she replied, “No.” “What of Maurice?” “Skip it.” “Anything to say to anyone?” “Skip it.” “A biographical note?” “Skip it.” “And how do you pass the day?” “Thinking and playing chess,” was her smug response. Valerie stayed tight-lipped about her motives and her case, taking seriously Flo’s advice about not giving the press information that could get distorted.

In private, however, Valerie spoke freely about the shooting. When she learned she would meet Ti-Grace and Flo, she wrote enthusiastically to Ti-Grace, saying, “I’d be delighted to see you. Please come up as soon as possible.” (Valerie also insisted, in a postscript, that “there was some nonsense in the paper about how my real name is the above, but my stage name + the name by which my friends know me is valeria solanis. The latter was simply a misprint in the credits of “I, a Man.” The only name I ever use for any purpose is the 1st.”)12 Ti-Grace remembered that, at their first meeting, Valerie spoke clearly and openly about the shooting. “She recounted, with great glee, details about shooting Warhol, how he begged. It was a bit gruesome,” Ti-Grace recalled. “There was a deliciousness to her pleasure of recounting it that made me uneasy. She took great pleasure in describing how humiliated they were, how they were begging for mercy. It seemed inhuman to me. It had nothing to do with feminism at all. It had to do with artist’s rights.” Valerie described how she had taken out the gun and they started running around and trying to escape but could not leave because they were in a loft. She seemed to relish seeing them as helpless victims, on their knees begging her not to shoot them. “She did a whole imitation of it and she shot him again,” Ti-Grace noted. “It was very detailed, not pleasant.”

Valerie gave the background of how she came to shoot Andy, telling Flo and Ti-Grace that while living at the Chelsea Hotel, she was evicted for not paying rent. She lived on the street out of her little trunk and just before her eviction, Maurice, who also lived at the Chelsea Hotel, came to see her and said that he could help her out. He gave her five hundred dollars to buy SCUM Manifesto and her next two works and all the rights to them. Ti-Grace sensed Valerie’s panic. “She was paranoid schizophrenic so her impulses weren’t under the greatest control. She was under a lot of stress.” Ti-Grace got a fairly precise version of Valerie’s story: “She signed the contract, later realized what she had done, and of course he didn’t publish it and she lost the rights to publish it. She believed he had sold the movie rights to Warhol, too, so she was angry at Girodias. She sought advice from PEN, a big writer’s union, and they told her that Girodias was a well-known sleaze who had done the same thing with Nabokov’s Lolita and Terry Southern’s Candy; they had tried to break the contract and it was impossible. It was a shit contract and there was nothing she could do. She did try to resolve this in some sort of obvious, pedestrian way and also sought legal advice. It was terrible.”

Valerie told Flo and Ti-Grace that Maurice had been out of town the day of the shooting, and besides, she did not want to hurt the publisher. Instead, she felt shooting Andy would be great for publicity. She wasn’t that bad a shot, she said. (In a later meeting between Ti-Grace and Maurice, the latter directly admitted he would never have published SCUM Manifesto if Valerie hadn’t shot Andy, because it would not have been worth it.) “Valerie was a good PR person,” Ti-Grace said. “She knew she had to shoot Warhol.”

Sure enough, shortly after the shooting, all the bookstores carrying the mimeographed copies Valerie had distributed sold out of them, including Eighth Street Bookshop, Sheridan Square Paperback, Underground Uplift Unlimited, Tompkins Square Book Store, and East Side Book Store. Even Ti-Grace couldn’t find a copy. Valerie caught wind that Ti-Grace had not yet read the manifesto and attacked her in a letter, “Florynce told me that you hadn’t read it (the Manifesto). That being so, you really have no business writing and publicly speaking about it. It’s also obvious that, not only do you not understand SCUM, but that SCUM is not for you. SCUM is for whores, dykes, criminals, homicidal maniacs. Therefore, please refrain from commenting on SCUM + from ‘defending’ me. I already have an excess of ‘friends’ out there who are suffocating me.”13

Sadly, Maurice had the only available copy that Valerie knew of. Furious that they had not read the manifesto, she demanded that Ti-Grace and Flo meet with Maurice to get his copy, the only reliable and accessible copy. “You have to get that from him and try to get him to publish it,” Valerie pleaded, so Ti-Grace followed through and pursued Maurice for the copy. “I didn’t want to meet with him,” Ti-Grace admitted, “but I called him to ask him to Xerox it and that I would pay for it. He was really slimy and said he couldn’t afford to copy it so I’d have to meet him for lunch to get it. He was a sleaze. Pure sleaze. If he had control of my work, I’d burn everything I ever wrote!”

After Ti-Grace obtained SCUM Manifesto from Maurice (with his refusing to make copies from it), Ti-Grace cut stencils over the course of three evenings and then mimeographed seventy copies, writing Maurice, “I will give a number to her lawyer, Florynce Kennedy, and send the rest to carefully selected persons who have requested to see it, e.g., critics, feminists, philosophers, seriously interested press. I think this will promote a lively and well prepared milieu into which her book, when it is published, can be projected.”14 Ti-Grace told Valerie, “You know, it’s ironic, for three weeks I couldn’t get near a copy: now I have 70 copies sitting in boxes in my living room. Still no play!!”15 Ti-Grace chastised Maurice about Paul Krassner’s commentary on Valerie (she had obtained it in draft form from Maurice and it was to be published in Olympia Press’s edition of Valerie’s manifesto): “I thought it was vicious, irrelevant, egocentric, self-serving, and at no point facing the content of the Manifesto. I didn’t even think it was a respectable analysis of the irrelevancies he does discuss. Its only purpose is to set the most perfect example of what Valerie is most against; it was quite eerie.”16

Several weeks after the shooting, once she had met with Flo and Ti-Grace, Valerie became increasingly paranoid, agitated, and troublesome to deal with. She sent letters in which she crossed out the phrase printed on prison letterhead, “good correction reduces crime” and wrote in its place “eliminating men reduces crime.”17 Flo and Ti-Grace both noticed that Valerie’s delusions worsened. As Ti-Grace recalled, “You’d be talking to her and she would all of a sudden look at you and see you as somebody else, which was unnerving. We learned very quickly that if you cared about her at all, she became really abusive. I was trying to help her and she became abusive with me. She was abusive with Flo, too. Still, we persisted.” Ti-Grace sent Valerie money for stamps and personal items and insisted on showing solidarity with her. In return, and revealing Valerie’s tendency to reject those who helped her, her letters became more pointed and cruel toward Ti-Grace: “Astute of you to recognize that being denied association with me is oppressive, but that’s the way it is; I only develop friendships with my equals—originators, not interpreters.”18 That August, Valerie launched a full-frontal attack on Ti-Grace in another letter:

I know you, along with all the other professional parasites with nothing of their own going for them, are eagerly awaiting my commitment to the bughouse, so you can then go on t.v. + write press releases for your key people defending me + deploring my being committed because of my views; remember, I want to make perfectly clear that I am not being committed because of my views or the “SCUM Manifesto.” . . . Nor do I want you to continue to mouthe [sic] your cultivated banalities about my motive for shooting Warhol. Your gall in presuming to be competent to discourse on such a matter is beyond belief. In short do not ever publicly discuss me, SCUM, or any aspect at all of my care. Just DON’T.19

She added in a letter three weeks later, “Your colossal gall is inversely proportional to your pride. But what you’re doing is understandable, as SCUM’s where it’s at; SCUM is it. And you’re not the only one to recognize it; Everyone wants to be part of SCUM, to make it his or her own; the world will eventually be overcome by + turned into SCUM. If you’re not in SCUM, you’re nowhere; SCUM’s not only it, but it’s all there is.”20

As time went by, Ti-Grace kept making excuses for Valerie’s behavior, believing that her time in prison had changed her: “I did know a lot of people who were in prison and came out and had been really changed by it. They were hard to be around and were damaged by it. It’s not that they were crazy. They were damaged. That’s something different. I didn’t know with Valerie. I knew she had lived on the edge financially. I knew she was panhandling. That has to be hard. It puts you in a humiliating position where you’re begging. I felt for her.”

Like Ti-Grace, other feminists felt empathy for Valerie, and they arrived in New York wanting to visit her in prison. Roxanne had brought to the city a group of women who wanted to support Valerie and, after asking the court for Flo’s contact information, had arranged a meeting with Valerie and the group of women supporters. “It took a while for Flo to get the paperwork through but we went and had a visit with Valerie,” Roxanne remembered. “It was a little disturbing because she was in really bad shape. We could only see her through this plastic barrier and it was really scratched and had little kids’ handprints all over it. We could hardly see her and she could hardly see us. She couldn’t figure out who we were. We were talking all militant about revolution and everything. We wanted to go back and say how brilliant Valerie was.”21

Roxanne was impressed by Valerie’s intensity and energy. “I remember her eyes, even through this hard-see-through plastic screen. She had these piercing eyes, I mean, they really looked inside of you. She seemed like a person who had no ability to be false or lie in any way, so you felt stripped of your usual way of dealing with someone, you know, all the things you do plus the physical things you do to establish contact—gestures, facial expressions. She made you look at yourself differently. It stripped me of my defenses. You couldn’t bullshit with her at all.”22 Roxanne felt that, looking at Valerie, she was looking into a mirror. “All I could make out clearly were her piercing, black eyes and they were the same as my eyes.”23

When Roxanne and her good friend Dana Densmore visited Valerie at Elmhurst Hospital (one of many mental hospitals that housed Valerie that year) on August 30, 1968, Roxanne was struck by Valerie’s intelligence and fortitude, writing in a letter shortly after the visit, “What a mind Valerie has. I can guarantee that she is not a violent person, nor is she anti-male. She is angry and she is anti-Man. I felt I was in the presence of a very special person. Valerie’s brain fills the atmosphere—it vibrates and radiates. She has no sympathy for the enemy—men—but she does not consider all males the enemy. She has identified the enemy well—the managers of what she calls ‘the shitpile.’”24 One of Roxanne’s companions, Maureen Davidica, age nineteen at the time, had read the manifesto and had by then actually hatched a plan to develop a virus that would kill all men. (Roxanne joked, “When AIDS started, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, maybe Maureen did that and it went awry!’”) Roxanne described Maureen as militant and scary. When Maureen entered the room where Valerie was, she was so star-struck she could not open her mouth. She just stared at Valerie as Valerie kept repeating, “Who are you? Who are you?” Valerie had a way of stopping people in their tracks.25

The visit with Valerie left a deep impression on Roxanne. The group sat in the dayroom, drinking coffee and conversing, and despite being incarcerated, Valerie did not seem defeated. She talked incessantly about her writings, even reenacting the entire Up Your Ass script for them from memory that day, performing as each character and showing off for her radical feminist audience. “I’ve never been sure when it was too late for her to channel her anger and brilliance into something else,” Roxanne admitted. “She had been a loner for a long time. She lived very roughly, on the streets, sleeping on rooftops and she did tricks because of her pain. All of that was right there on the surface.” When thinking about Valerie forty years later, Roxanne recalled, “You could sense a heat coming from her like dynamism. She was like a hot wire. Even though she seemed to be kind of drugged up and passive, it still didn’t really control her.”26

Ti-Grace, too, felt a kinship with Valerie, even though Valerie rejected anyone who tried to help her or empathize with her. Ti-Grace wanted to stay in touch with her and “just try to do whatever friends do for friends.” She believed that, soon, people would have a chance to see her work and they could judge Valerie for themselves. Ti-Grace believed in Valerie, in what Valerie could do for the feminist movement: “She has dragged feminism kicking and screaming into the 20th Century in a very dramatic way,” she told reporters.27 “The Manifesto is the most important feminist document to appear in the English-speaking world that I know of. Solanas places feminism squarely as the key to any meaningful political, and eventually social, change. She takes the male-chauvinist spiel and turns it on its head. . . . Rightly or wrongly, Solanas has brought feminism up-to-date for the first time in history.”28

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 Allen 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 where 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.

Despite her anger, Ti-Grace convinced Flo to accompany her to Matteawan, motivated in part by the evident shock and fear that Valerie was feeling.50 Ti-Grace told Valerie they had to talk about her letter to Betty; Valerie indicated that she did not remember sending it and admitted that she felt embarrassed. Flo announced to Valerie, “I’m here because Ti-Grace made me come. I don’t understand crazy. When you said I was fired, I’m gone. I will, if you’d like, try to see if I can get other lawyers to help you, but it’s not going to be me.” Seeing Valerie in Matteawan did inspire some sympathy from both of them. “Everybody was so heavily drugged. It was just an unbelievable place. I couldn’t see just abandoning her there,” Ti-Grace said, “On the other hand, by now I really didn’t like her. I was really fed up with this. I didn’t understand this abuse. Valerie called me names. She really attempted to dominate and abuse me. She was very manipulative.” Still, Flo and Ti-Grace did what they could to help her.

Ti-Grace begged Valerie to stop abusing her, asserting, “If we fight, it just serves our common enemy and defeats the goal we’re trying to reach.”51 Valerie wrote to Ti-Grace trying to explain why she had reacted so angrily to Ti-Grace’s help, claiming that Ti-Grace too quickly appropriated her cause as her own: “One thing I forgot to mention when I saw you, but which I had intended to in the way of clearing the air + paving the way for friendship is that one thing I had resented about you was what struck me as a proprietary attitude towards me + SCUM. I often had the impression that I don’t belong to me, but to Girodias, Warhol, you—whoever wants to grab at me + SCUM + monopolize us. I don’t know that just telling you this will cause you to refrain from any behavior in the future that’ll give me that impression.”52

Roxanne, too, encountered the force of Valerie’s ambivalence about receiving help from feminists. On her last visit to Matteawan, Roxanne tried to organize a committee to help Valerie with the aid of Flo and Ti-Grace, but the effort did not last long because Valerie had not wanted any more help from them. Valerie had stopped trusting anyone and had become extremely paranoid by then. This hit Roxanne hard, but though Valerie resisted the women’s help, Roxanne still admired her radical self-determination: “She will die or live in the nuthouse forever before she will waver an inch from her internal freedom. She is a free being. That is the most overwhelming sense I had in her presence,” Roxanne wrote after their last meeting.53

In early October 1968, after her falling out with Valerie over her provision of legal aid, Ti-Grace resigned from NOW and founded the October 17th Movement—a group of radical women aligned around the idea of upending institutionalized sexism. (This action likely started radical feminism as we know it today, with Valerie as the destroyer and Ti-Grace as the brains behind it.) Roxanne said of Ti-Grace’s departure, “It was a whole bunch of things. It was defending Valerie, also fighting Betty Friedan’s exclusion of lesbians and of [the] ‘lavender menace.’ Valerie was at the center of a lot of other big fights.”54 In a press release, Ti-Grace stated her reasons for resigning as the NOW chapter president: “Since the beginning there have been bitter schisms over taking unequivocal positions on certain issues: abortion, marriage, the family, and support of persons in the cause who have crossed the law (e.g. Bill Baird, Valerie Solanas), the inextricable relationship between caste and class.” In a private letter to Valerie, Ti-Grace wrote, “I’ve had a hell of a two weeks. Close friendships have been split over it, I was put on a sort of trial, I have a good $150 telephone bill because people were trying to help me from Washington, the membership rose up against the Executive Committee. My God, what a circus!”55

Flo admitted that she had become bored and turned off by NOW: “I’ve always thought it was a bad idea to wrestle over control of an organization, and when I went to meetings where they would spend endless hours arguing over whether to have red cabbage or white for the slaw, I would just think to myself, ‘I can’t waste my time on this bullshit,’ and go off and set up a committee. I founded the Feminist Party after NOW got to be so boring and scared; I can’t see leaving my house and getting into a subway or a cab to go to a meeting where everybody is more terrified than I am.”56

An October 24, 1968, article in the Washington Post reported that Betty had attempted to expel Ti-Grace from NOW after the latter appeared in court with Valerie following the Warhol shootings. Ti-Grace, who chose to leave NOW, was asked why she had done so. She responded, “There was a whole series of things, including Valerie, the whole attitude, the panic, the abortion issue. I didn’t want a hierarchy. I wanted a rotating president to diffuse power and encourage everyone’s energies. You’ve got a revolution or you’ve got nothing. I didn’t understand why, on everything I thought was really important, they were a drag, pulling back.” She felt betrayed by Valerie. “I left in October ’68 so I was coming to some pretty depressing conclusions about Valerie by then”; however, “to have reacted the way NOW did to Valerie was really unacceptable.”

After leaving NOW, Ti-Grace had minimal contact with Valerie, aside from delivering a book—Thomas Szasz’s Life, Liberty, and Psychiatry—Valerie had requested and having an encounter in which Valerie asked her to let her mother know where she was and how to reach her.57 She gave Ti-Grace her mother’s phone number in Baltimore. Ti-Grace called and spoke first to Valerie’s sister, Judith who disclosed to Ti-Grace that schizophrenia ran in the family and lots of family members had suffered from it. Admitting that Valerie had shown some signs of schizophrenia years before, Judith said that they had not heard from her in a long time. Ti-Grace also spoke to Valerie’s mother, whom she remembered as a “kind, middle-class woman”; Ti-Grace worried that Valerie’s mother would be disturbed by Valerie’s pornographic references (“a staple for her”) and struggles with mental illness. Ultimately, Ti-Grace regretted placing such an strong emphasis on Valerie as a symbol of the feminist movement, saying, “I paid plenty for defending her.”

The Aftermath of Hurricane Valerie

If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.

—Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

Following the Warhol shootings and Valerie’s imprisonment, SCUM Manifesto received an immediate surge in attention. Maurice pushed to have the manifesto published as quickly as possible, using the shooting as a selling point, and in August 1968 Olympia Press released the book, with an introduction by Maurice and commentary by Paul Krassner. The work had provoked a series of questions from sympathizers and enemies alike. NOW had fractured into liberal and radical camps, and Valerie had induced panic at the Factory, where the group already known as outsiders had been dealt a serious blow to their usually calm and free-form existence. Despite her newfound fame—something Valerie had longed for—she still struggled to make connections and find any sort of home. Having alienated nearly everyone who could help her, she found herself, once again, radically alone.

Prior to her imprisonment, Valerie had carried around a small trunk of her most prized belongings, lugging it from place to place as she moved from the Chelsea Hotel to various people’s homes, where she slept in a kind of permanent impermanence. During Valerie’s imprisonment at Matteawan in late 1968, Ti-Grace had received a phone call from Anna Kross, the judge who had handled Valerie’s arraignment. Judge Kross indicated that she had a trunk that belonged to Valerie and asked Ti-Grace to come to her home to see which things in it should be preserved.58 Inside the trunk Ti-Grace found a copy of Up Your Ass and copies of the Cavalier piece and another piece she wrote for Hustler magazine. (Ti-Grace called it “typical male pornography, S&M, really written from that place. I assume she was writing it to make some money and you can’t play around too much if you want the money.”) Also inside the trunk were letters. “Valerie had joined the National Women’s Party in the fifties and she had written to Paul Freund about the Equal Rights Amendment. She had kept the correspondence and I remember getting chills and saying, ‘Oh my God, this is how I’m going to end up!’” Valerie’s letters were “sort of girlish,” polite, according to Ti-Grace; in them Valerie asked Freund why he did not support the Equal Rights Amendment. He wrote her back a “liberal but patronizing” letter. “He was this great constitutional lawyer who taught at Harvard, telling her the ERA was covered by the Fourteenth Amendment and not to worry about it,” Ti-Grace scoffed.

Ti-Grace asked Judge Kross to keep the trunk until Valerie was released from prison and Kross agreed. On a visit to see Valerie in prison, Ti-Grace told her she had her trunk. Valerie was enraged that Ti-Grace had seen her things. “I don’t know,” mused Ti-Grace, “if it was the Paul Freund or the porn. I think she never wanted anybody to know that she ever had an interest in something like the Equal Rights Amendment.” (And for Valerie, a documented interest in within-movement feminism would be far more scandalous than the pornography she had penned.) The fact that Valerie had kept the letters showed their importance to her; she did not keep any other letters, not even from family members. No personal letters or belongings at all were found in the trunk.

Valerie had long had conflicted feelings about her role in the feminist movement, often preferring to insist on total outsider status. Her letters pleading on behalf of the ERA—notably written during her period in graduate school—suggested that she cared more about such politics than her later self would let on. For the most part, she expressed near constant anger with feminists, believing they were “schmucks.” She told others that she was never a feminist, had no interest in any political movements, and was a writer and an artist, nothing else. Valerie viewed feminists as “dupes” and “know-nothings,” telling her friend Jeremiah that she felt flattered by the attention from the women’s movement but bitter because she had no following for SCUM’s plan to attract true saboteurs.59 Within-movement feminists could never truly “unwork,” could never sabotage, undermine, and operate on a criminal basis.

In a lengthy letter to Ti-Grace in February 1969, Valerie derided Ti-Grace’s efforts to defend her and show interest in SCUM:

I know you’ll be delirious with delight to learn that you’re going to at last receive the widespread recognition that you’ve been groveling and sucking after for the past 8 or 9 months. Your preface days will soon be over; you are going to emerge in all your suave, polished, cultivated splendor in my text. To repay your kindness in interpreting & explaining me & expounding on my motives to the public & because you’ve been grossly misunderstood I’m going to interpret & explain you & expound on your motives to the public. My next book after Wrap Up, the last word on everything (that’s why it’s called Wrap Up; it wraps every thing up), will be Why I Shot Andy Warhol and Other Chit Chat, a collection of essays. One of the essays will be titled, “Out of the Woodwork.” In it I will describe what crawled out of the woodwork when SCUM was sprayed into the air. . . . How’s your rewording of SCUM Manifesto, which you thought of before you read the Manifesto, coming along?60

Valerie seemed to have a bottomless rage toward feminists who appropriated her work. After her release from Matteawan in late 1971, she began contacting radical feminists, making various complaints. First, she attacked Robin Morgan for publishing an excerpt of SCUM Manifesto in the collection Sisterhood is Powerful without her permission and without payment. Valerie’s original letter to Robin joked, “If you can’t write, anthologize. Keep plugging, Baby. Valerie Solanas.”61 Robin had in fact mailed Valerie a letter asking permission to reprint sections of SCUM Manifesto for a small fee but had never heard back.62 Robin subsequently proceeded to include sections of SCUM Manifesto without Valerie’s permission. Though Valerie did receive payment for her excerpt in Sisterhood Is Global (though the payment may have disappeared during her hospitalization), she hated Robin for using her work. As Robin recounted, “Now, suddenly, she is released—and livid. She decides that (1) she is not now and never has been a feminist but is a ‘killer dyke biker,’ (2) I have defamed her by printing her work in the context of feminism, and (3) I am somehow responsible for her having been sent to a mental institution in the first place.” Valerie phoned Robin repeatedly, informing her that she planned to throw acid in her face and blind her for life. “I try to reason with her,” Robin wrote, “finally stop answering the phone, shudder a lot.”63 Another radical feminist, Judith Brown, wrote of her exhaustion with Valerie in a letter: “The big romance with Valerie is over for us down here.” She added, “I’m sorry if our period of wrangled consciousness on that issue caused you some trouble, but having gone through a ‘Valerie thing,’ I can better deal with it in others.”64

Maintaining her targets of vengeance, Valerie called Ti-Grace and asked to see her. Ti-Grace described what happened:

I said, “Valerie, I don’t want to see you anymore,” and she said, “Oh, I just got out of prison and it’s my birthday.” Well, being the sort of woman she hates right from the SCUM Manifesto, I’m moved so I say, “Oh it’s your birthday, right? I’ll make some dinner and ask some people over.” I asked Shulie [Firestone] and Anne [Koedt] and another radical feminist friend. I don’t cook for people normally, but I made some spaghetti and a cake. I remember that the cake was sort of sloping. Well, of course, it wasn’t her birthday. She just comes in and announces—it was very embarrassing—to everyone that no, she wasn’t a feminist and she had no interest in the women’s movement whatsoever. She was an artist. She was a writer. That’s it. Well, that sort of dampened the evening and people were leaving. Valerie was staying and, fortunately, Anne hadn’t left yet. Valerie said that she was moving in with me and I was—I’ll never forget this scene. I had picked up the dishes and was standing over the sink washing the dishes. She’s got her pea coat on. She’s got her pen in her pocket, shoving me like it’s a gun, pushing it against me, saying she’s going to stay, that she’s moving in. I’m crying while doing the dishes. This is a humble housewife or something! I was crying because I didn’t cook for anybody and I realized she’d lied to me and I had done something I don’t like to do in order to please her or honor her in some way, and she just spit all over me. I was crying because no man could get away with that with me. I would have spotted it. I would have been more suspicious. It was very sad. I’m standing over the dishes crying. What is this scene?! Anne, who’s a rather quiet person, she really sized it up. She said, “Come on, Valerie, I’m going to give you a ride. I’m taking a cab downtown and I’ll give you a lift. Come on. I’m not leaving until you come with me.” She finally got up and left.

A week later, Valerie again called Ti-Grace, to relate her latest exploits. Ti-Grace stopped her immediately: “Just stop! I tried to be your friend. Maybe it’s my fault, maybe I don’t know how to be your friend, but I’ve tried and I’ve had it. You abuse me and I don’t like anybody abusing me. I don’t like men abusing me, and I don’t like women abusing me. I don’t want you to call me anymore.” Valerie responded, “You don’t like this?” Ti-Grace, sensing amazement on Valerie’s part, reiterated, “No, Valerie, I don’t. I don’t like to be insulted and abused. Please don’t call me anymore.” “Okay” came the reply. And she never did call her again. Ti-Grace believed that “she genuinely thought this was a way to relate to people. She certainly didn’t want to change and I think she was genuinely surprised that I was so upset and that it was really over.”

Valerie had finally succeeded in alienating even the closest of political allies, leaving only a small handful of people who sympathized with, or admired, her. Believing herself a writer, Valerie refused all claims on her political alliances or motives. Ben Morea offered an animated description of the central role her writing played in her life: “She was 100 percent artist. One hundred percent writer. It was always part of the conversation and part of her life, writing her thoughts, her desire to communicate ideas. It came up all the time. It was just part of our conversation.”65 In his view, “She saw a need to raise a lot of issues around what happens to women and the SCUM Manifesto was the best way she could express herself.”66 Ben emphasized the importance of thinking of Valerie as a writer:

The best I’d ever hope is that she was given respect as a woman of thought and a woman of letters rather than as a maniacal killer. I would hope that people would see the creative, the important side of her, and respect her for that. Of course she was an artist. André Breton once said something like, “To go out and randomly kill somebody is a revolutionary act, a surrealistic act.” In other words, it’s not a homicidal act, but even if it was a homicidal act, she was justified as far as I’m concerned. . . . I don’t think she would have been upset if the story illuminated her true nature, her creativity. She had a purpose. She was driven by a purpose. She saw a vacuum that she felt that she could delineate. I think that she would have been in some ways grateful to have that exposure. I think that if somebody wrote a negative piece about her and made the high point of her life shooting Andy, she would have been upset, rightfully, because that wasn’t the high point. That was just a footnote. She existed independent of the act of shooting Andy. She existed as a writer.

Giving his thoughts on Valerie and feminism, Ben recalled her distaste for liberals in general, and particularly for feminist liberals:

She saw herself as a radical, just as I had a disdain for political liberals because I consider myself a radical. She spoke of her disgust, how stupid they were, or how shallow they were, or how one-dimensional they were, but she never came across as a really angry person. She came across as a person angered by stupidity and angered by the situation that existed but not as an angry person. I was much more like that than she was. She had a lot to contribute to the feminist political world and had a lot to offer and should be taken seriously. I had a lot to offer in my world, in my arena, the more political, artistic, cultural world, in general. Radical feminists who reject Valerie aren’t radical feminists. It’s a game. They’re liberal. They were afraid to go that last mile. Radicals are ready to go over the edge. Liberals just go so far. She threatened them because she went all the way. She played out her conviction rather than just riding it. I played out my conviction rather than just riding it. That’s the difference between radicals and liberals.67