Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist known for the attempted assassination of artist Andy Warhol in 1968.
Solanas appeared in the Warhol film I, a Man (1967) and self-published the SCUM Manifesto, a potentially satirical pamphlet calling for the extinction of men. She believed Warhol was conspiring with her publisher, Maurice Girodias, to keep her manuscript from getting published. On June 3, 1968, Solanas shot Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya at the Factory. She was charged with attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a firearm. Solanas was subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to three years in prison. After her release, she was arrested again for aggravated assault in 1971 after threatening editors Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan of Grove Press. She was subsequently institutionalized several times. Solanas continued to promote the SCUM Manifesto and was an editor for the biweekly feminist magazine Majority Report and then drifted into obscurity. She became destitute and died of pneumonia in 1988.
Early life and education
Valerie Solanas was born in 1936 in Ventnor City, New Jersey, to Louis Solanas and Dorothy Marie Biondo. Her father was a bartender and her mother a dental assistant. She had a younger sister, Judith Arlene Solanas Martinez. Her father was born in Montreal, Quebec, to parents who immigrated from Spain. Her mother was an Italian-American of Genoan and Sicilian descent born in Philadelphia. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother remarried shortly afterwards. Solanas disliked her stepfather and began rebelling against her mother, becoming a truant. As a child, she wrote insults for children to use on one another, for the cost of a dime. She beat up a girl in high school who was bothering a younger boy, and also hit a nun. In 1953, Solanas gave birth to a son, fathered by a married sailor. The child, named David, was taken away and she never saw him again.