Nevertheless, readers cannot simply dismiss her manifesto as a crazy woman’s tirade. Shortly after her self-publication, Solanas shot and almost killed Andy Warhol, causing even more people to spurn her as insane. Because of articles like “How to Be a Good Housewife” and television shows like Leave It to Beaver from the 1950s, however, society still expected women to remain at home and nurture their families. Sold by Solanas on the streets, it came during a supposedly progressive era at the close of the civil rights movement and the emergence of the anti-war movement. 1 This radical manifesto declared that women must “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex” (Solanas). Deemed a paranoid schizophrenic by the state, Solanas was immortalized in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol.įor a taste of SCUM Manifesto, click here.In 1967, Valerie Solanas wrote and self-published the SCUM Manifesto, which called for male gendercide and the creation of a superior, all-female society.

Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist playwright and social propagandist who was arrested in 1968 after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol. You’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out.” -Valerie Solanas “Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals’, the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon… It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it’s painful.” -Michelle Tea

The truth of the world as seen though Valerie’s eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke.

“To see the SCUM Manifesto’s humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. This is an update of the essential AK Press edition, with a new foreword. Shifting fluidly between the worlds of satire and straightforward critique, this classic is a call to action-a radical feminist vision for a different world. “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”įirst circulated on the streets of Greenwich Village in 1967, the SCUM Manifesto is a searing indictment of patriarchal culture in all its forms.

The scum manifesto