American Women and Domestic Terrorism

The Deadly War on Women

I was doing a little baking this afternoon, and while I was making my son's favorite cookies (Martha Stewart's Double-Chocolate Chunk cookies, if you're interested), I was catching up on my podcasts.

And so it was that I listened to Gloria Steinem in conversation with Tom Ashbrook, an On Point episode broadcast earlier this week. The starting point for the discussion was Steinem's new documentary series, Woman (airing on the Viceland channel), but the talk ranged widely--though it maintained its focus on women's status in the world, particularly as victims of violence.

(For some reason, the mere discussion of this topic--that, globally, women are the victims of extraordinary levels of violence, enrages some people. The comments section at the On Point website is brutal . . . Apparently the idea that global violence against women is linked to political, social, and economic instability cannot be tolerated.)

One of the very first posts I wrote on this site was about Gloria Steinem (to see that earlier piece, click here.) What prompted me to write today was a comment she made in this recent conversation with Ashbrook--she noted that, in the U.S., since 9/11, more women have been killed by their husbands or boyfriends--domestic terrorists--than "all the Americans who were killed by 9/11 or in Afghanistan and Iraq."

I had heard her make this statement before--but it struck me particularly hard as I was standing in my kitchen making cookies. 

As it turns out, the statement seems to date back to 2014--and as shocking as it may sound, it has been fact-checked and proved to be true:

James A. Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor, found that from 2002-12, the number of women killed by intimate partners was 15,462. A tally from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics showed 10,470 women killed in intimate partner homicides from 2002-10.

Fewer than 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attacks on Sept.11, 2001. (There were 2,978 victims, but that includes people from 90 countries.) American deaths tied to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq total 6,838, according the Pentagon. Together, there were about 9,838 deaths.

In her 2015 Boston Globe story, headlined "In This War on Women, the Death Toll Mounts," columnist Renée Graham makes a similar point, using comparable statistics, adding:

We fret about terrorism and mass murders in public places, though violence against women claims far more victims while receiving a fraction of the attention. It cuts across race, class, religion, and every other demographic line, and is as much a repulsive trait of our national character as racism. With each lethal encounter, there are just as many imperishable scars — children dead or orphaned, families and friends shattered. Every day these women are dying among us; we owe them more than makeshift memorials and weary resignation.

And here is a direct quotation from Steinem, from an 11 May 2016 interview on PRI's The Takeaway:

Domestic violence in this country has killed since 9/11 — if you take the number of [Americans] who were killed in 9/11 and in two wars in Iraq, and in the 14-year war in Afghanistan — more women have been murdered by their husbands and boyfriends in the United States in that period of time than [the number of Americans who] have been killed in all of those incidences of terrorism and wars,” Steinem says. “We are not exempt here by any means. If all of us could raise one generation of children without violence, we don’t know what might be possible.

The Martha Stewart double-chocolate cookies are really good. But I sorta lost my appetite.

Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto

Valerie Solanas (born 9 April 1936)

If she had lived, Valerie Solanas would have been seventy-nine years old today, two years younger than Gloria Steinem, who is still vigorous, active, and involved, an iconic--and beloved--figure in the second-wave feminist movement. But Solanas died in 1988, at age fifty-two. She is not a revered figure whose life and work are celebrated. No major universities have endowed academic chairs in her name. A polarizing figure, at best, Solanas is still the subject of scorn and vitriol, nearly thirty years after her death.

Many people despise her--I am not one of them.

Solanas was a provocateur, radical and volatile. She was angry, confrontational, and violent--and while I do not excuse her acts of violence, neither do I believe her to be a depraved monster. 

In the past, I have compared Valerie Solanas to a woman whom I have already profiled in this blog, Arcangela Tarabotti.* And in many ways, it is hard to say which is more shocking today, Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny or Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. I've taught both texts to classes full of college students, and my sense is that they find Tarabotti's work every bit as challenging and upsetting as Solanas's.

I was in college when the Women’s Liberation movement was born, when the newly formed National Organization of Women celebrated Mother’s Day by demanding “Rights, Not Roses,” when a group of New York feminists protested by burying a dummy of “Traditional Womanhood” at a peace rally in Washington D. C., when Angela Davis was on the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives,” and when a group of lesbian radicals began publishing The Furies, a “lesbian/feminist monthly.”

In the midst of all of this, in early 1967, Valerie Solanas began selling mimeographed copies of her SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York. Even though I know the context out of which she wrote, I still take a deep breath before I open up my slim copy of Solanas’s work. I know what to expect, but she still takes my breath away. 

Solanas is very clear not only about the genre but about the purpose of her work: 

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.

For a long time, Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto were largely written out of feminist history. Robin Morgan did include selections from the Manifesto in her 1970 Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (misspelling Solanas’s name as “Solanis”), and Germaine Greer wrote incisively and sympathetically about the manifesto in The Female Eunuch, published the same year.

But as second-wave feminism became less radical and more mainstream, Solanas tended to disappear. Now-classic references like Yale’s 1990 The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1203 pages) and Bloomsbury Publishing’s 1992 Guide to Women’s Literature throughout the World: From Sappho to Atwood, Women’s Writing through the Ages (more than 5,000 entries) ignored Solanas as they helped to shape an emerging canon of “women writers.” Even today, the self-proclaimed “landmark” American National Biography, which “offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women—from all eras and walks of life—whose lives have shaped the nation” mentions Solanas only in its entry on Andy Warhol and describes her only as an “aspiring actress.”

As for me, now that I have reread Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto before writing this post, I am struck at the visceral responses it still evokes, nearly fifty years after Solanas wrote it. While critical reassessment of Solanas’s Manifesto has begun, too many readers respond not to Solanas’s work but to her life. She is reduced to the events of 3 June 1968, when she shot Andy Warhol, and the SCUM Manifesto is read as if it were the mad ramblings of a female jihadist rather than a carefully crafted text. 

More than one careful reader has compared Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal--I have made this comparison myself, in fact. The savage satire of Swift’s “proposal” is shocking and provocative, yet this eighteenth-century text is a staple of the literature classroom—I first read it in high school, and it was assigned reading in several of my undergraduate and graduate literature courses.

Swift’s The Modest Proposal is read and taught as a conscious literary effort, a brilliant example of Juvenalian satire, perhaps inspired by the second-century Christian Father of the Church, Tertullian, and his Apology in Defense of Christianity. In his “proposal,” Swift “advocates” infanticide and cannibalism—cooking and eating Irish babies—as the only logical means of curing deplorable social, political, and economic ills. Yet no one reads Swift’s A Modest Proposal literally—or, at least, they don’t read it literally for long, if the ridicule heaped on naïve high-school students in my 1967 high school classroom was typical. If you didn’t get it, you were an idiot. Although Swift’s life ended in debility, violence, and madness, that life—and his work—aren’t reduced to his debility, violence, and madness.

Swift’s legacy is his writing—A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, chief among his literary achievements. But Solanas is reduced too often to “madness” and her act of violence. The SCUM Manifesto is read as the primary symptom of this madness and violence. Its craft—its satiric brilliance, its linguistic sparkle, its stylistic inventiveness (Solanas’s extravagant lists, for example, with their breathtaking juxtapositions)—is all too frequently ignored. 

But, against all odds and the many efforts to discredit her or to erase her altogether, Valerie Solanas managed to live on, despite the outrage and the efforts to make her--and her work--disappear. When she was interviewed in 1991, Solanas’s mother gave her daughter an identity that she was largely denied in her own lifetime—her daughter was a writer, Dorothy Moran insisted.

Today, there is the slick hardcover edition of the SCUM Manifesto with hot-pink endpapers and a more recent paperback (which, oddly, also uses hot pink in its design), but that radical identity Solanas dared to claim—writer—has survived in other ways, less pinkified and "girly," as witnessed by graffiti images captured by passersby and shared online.

One image, posted in December 2006 on Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website, is from a bathroom stall somewhere in New York City. On the grimy, mustard-yellow door (underneath "buns, not guns"), near the hinge, is scrawled, “Read the SCUM Manifesto.” Another photo, this one part of a series of “Ivy League” graffiti images, was posted online in 2008. It offers first a command, in large letters, “♀—read the SCUM MANIFESTO.” In smaller letters, below, the writer offers her rationale: “our justified rage can be hilarious!” And then there’s the photo of another piece of graffiti, found outside a sex shop in Gothenburg, Sweden, and posted in 2009. This image is in stark black and white, black italic script, slightly blurred, on a white stucco wall: “Valerie Was Right.”

Eva the Weaver's flikr image

In fact, I put together a visual presentation for my students in spring 2013, the last time I taught Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. I collected dozens of such graffiti images posted online, including photographs taken on the campus of Evergreen State College, in my home state of Washington, others from places as far away from one another as New Orleans and Barcelona, and  recent  stencil graffito found "earlier this year" on a wall in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

There are comic books, art school projects, blog posts (like this one), cartoons, and reimaginations posted on Facebook. And there are tons of products--jackets, "Valerie was right" barettes, t-shirts, even baby onesies. I love these memorials—testimony to the enduring nature of Solanas’s work as a writer and to the survival of her anger and her humor. 

More recently, Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto do seem to be making their way back into history. Solanas is included in both the 2004 Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (Harvard) and in the 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography. Breanne Fahs has just published the first biography of Solanas, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol), published by the Feminist Press. 

There are several print editions of the SCUM Manifesto available for sale on Amazon, but I first encountered the text in one of its many online iterations. For once, in the spirit of Solanas, who distributed her work on the streets of New York, I'll suggest reading it online--it's becoming increasingly difficult to find it there (free, as opposed to buying someone's version of Solanas)--but, for now, you can find the SCUM Manifesto by clicking this link. (It is a transcription done in 1994 by a writer who had a UK version of Solanas's text.)

*Parts of this post have been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds: Six Centuries of Writing by Women Imagining Rooms of Their Own. 

Battling Bella

Bella Abzug (died 31 March 1998)

A 1971 photo of Bella Abzug
in one of her trademark hats

Political activist, critical voice in the second-wave feminist movement, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and notable hat-wearer, Bella Abzug is the woman who memorably stated, in her 1970 political campaign, "This woman's place is in the House—the House of Representatives."

Born in 1920, the same year women in the U.S. finally achieved the right to vote, Abzug dedicated her life to social and political activism. Asked about why she always wore a hat, Abzug once explained, "I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee."

If you want to get a sense of Bella Abzug, check out the short video, "Bella Abzug: In Her Own Words." There are lots of great books, but you might start with this one, an oral history edited by Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom: Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way.

Some Memorable, Prescient, and Important Abzug Quotations

• I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy.
• Maybe we weren't at the Last Supper, but we're certainly going to be at the next one.
• They used to give us a day--it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.
• The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.
• Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over.
• Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.
• We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it.
• I am not elevating women to sainthood, nor am I suggesting that all women share the same views, or that all women are good and all men bad.
• If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century--and the economy--around.
• Abortion doesn't belong in the political arena. It's a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.
• I prefer the word "homemaker" because "housewife" always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.
• The establishment is made up of little men, very frightened.
• All of the men on my staff can type.
• I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business.
• The inside operation of Congress -- the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building -- is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.

From the left, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisolm (speaking),
Gracia Molina de Pick, Betty Friedan, and LaDonna Harris

Gloria Steinem and Rutgers University

Rutgers University and an Endowed Chair for Gloria Steinem

Rutgers announced today its campaign to create an endowed chair named for and in honor of feminist Gloria Steinem. From Rutgers Today, 29 September 2014:

Rutgers has launched a campaign to create an endowed chair named for Gloria Steinem – one of  the most prominent modern American feminists – that will focus on the creative and complex ways information technology and new media are reshaping culture and power relationships. 

The Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies will be a unique collaboration among Rutgers' Institute for Women's Leadership, School of Communications and Information, and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the School of Arts and Sciences.