Valerie Solanas is famous for two things: shooting Andy Warhol and writing the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, perhaps the most wilfully outrageous radical feminist polemic. Initially self-published and sold by her on the streets of New York in 1967, it called upon “responsible, thrill-seeking females to overthrow the government… institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex”.
The book gained its initial notoriety after Solanas’s attempted assassination of Warhol at his studio, the Factory, on 3 June 1968. Having handed herself in to the police hours after the shooting, she was charged with attempted murder, and later sentenced to three years for “reckless assault with intent to harm” after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After her arrest, she reputedly told a reporter: “Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.”
