Shulamith Firestone and the Case for Feminist Revolution

Shulamith Firestone (died 28 August 2012)

One of the key figures in radical second-wave feminism, Shulamith Firestone was an activist, organizer, and writer.

Born on 7 January 1945 in Ottawa, Canada, Firestone was raised and educated in the United States, moving to New York City in 1967. There she co-founded, with Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch, and Pam Allen, the New York Radical Women, known for its consciousness-raising sessions, hallmarks of the developing second-wave feminist activism.

Firestone is best known for her 1970 The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution in which she developed a radical feminist political theory.

Firestone begins with an excellent history of the first-wave feminist movement, which culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

She then goes on to argue that women must control their own reproductive system--as long as women must bear and rear children, they will lack full equality. She also argued that the "sexual revolution" hadn't liberated women at all, since the sexual double-standard persisted.

Susan Faludi's New Yorker essay, "Death of a Revolutionary," written just months after Firestone's death, is a great place to begin. Responding to Faludi's "not unsympathetic portrait," which she said "amounted to pathologizing Firestone’s catalytic intensity and quixotic personality while extending her assessment to an entire generation of 70s feminists," Kathleen B. Jones's "Legacy of a Feminist Revolutionary" is an essential follow-up.

But don't stop there--The Dialectic of Sex is still in print, forty-five years after it was first published. 

Women Get the Vote!

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (certified 26 August 1920)

Those darn women! Always wanting things. Like the right to vote. Here's the text of the amendment that finally extended the franchise to women:*

1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
2. Congress shall have power to enforce this Article by appropriate legislation.

Passed by the House of Representatives on 21 May 1919 and by the Senate on 4 June 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on 18 August 1920, when Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to approve it. 

Alice Paul, 1920,
raising a glass (of juice) in victory

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was certified on 26 August 1920.

Just over two months later, on 8 November 1920, some eight million American women voted in the first national elections for which they were eligible to vote. 

(It took more than sixty years for the rest of the states to pass the Nineteenth Amendment--Mississippi didn't get around to ratifying that pesky amendment until 22 March 1984. Go, Mississippi!)

Of course extending the franchise to women by amending the constitution did not go unchallenged--for the Supreme Court case Leser v. Garnett (1922), unanimously upholding the constitutionality of the Nineteenth Amendment, click here.

And here's a bonus note for the day: on the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, on 26 August 1970, women across America conducted a Women's Strike for Equality. Here are a few images from the march in New York City, headed by Betty Friedan:

Betty Friedan at the march

I hope somebody's planning a kick-ass celebration for 26 August 2020!!

*If you consider the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 as the start of the women's suffrage movement, it took more than seventy years for women to achieve this goal. If you missed them, here are posts for the first and second days of the Convention. And if you ever wondered what happened to the Equal Rights Amendment, click here.

Update, August 2019: And the centennial begins! Check out Jennifer Schluesser's "The Complex History of the Women's Suffrage Movement." The New York Times piece notes three exhibitions on the subject of women's suffrage that complicate and expand the discussion of the movement. Schluesser's piece contains links to exhibitions opening at the National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress and the National Archives (all in Washington, D.C.).

Update, 26 August 2020: Well, because of the pandemic there were no kick-ass celebrations. At least there was a PBS documentary.  And a postage stamp. For more, click here.

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

Judy Chicago's Opening Night

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (opening night, 14 March 1979)

The Dinner Party,
place settings for Mary Wollstonecraft and Sojourner Truth

One of the most amazing and controversial second-wave feminist works is Judy Chicago's monumental, multi-media art installation, The Dinner Party.

In an effort to reclaim women's history--and to provide a counternarrative to canonical art memorializing the New Testament story of the Last Supper--Chicago decided to use the idea of a banquet to create her symbolic history of women.

Instead of women's usual roles on such formal occasions, preparing the meal, serving it, and then cleaning up the mess, Chicago conceived of an oversize banquet table with place settings for thirty-nine women. Their individual place settings, each one of which includes a unique and elaborate needlework runner, a sculptural dinner plate, utensils, and a goblet, are arranged on three sides of a triangular table, each side of which is forty-eight feet long. This table is set on top of what Chicago calls a "heritage floor," 999 porcelain tiles, each one inscribed with the name of another notable woman.

The place settings are arranged chronologically, each side called a wing. The first wing begins with the primordial goddess and ends with Hypatia of Alexandria. The second begins with Marcella of Rome and extends to Anna van Schurman. The first place setting on the third wing is for Anne Hutchinson, the last for Georgia O'Keefe.

Almost lost for want of a home, The Dinner Party is now permanently displayed at the Virginia A Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Museum hosts an incredible gallery for online viewing. Included is a history of the art work, a virtual tour of the piece, from entry banners, detailed looks at each of the place settings, a description and viewing of the Heritage Floor and seven Heritage Panels. 

If you can't go to Brooklyn, at the very least take the online tour today!

The banquet table, The Dinner Party

Update, 7 February 2018: For Sasha Weiss's extended retrospective on Judy Chicago's life and work, "Judy Chicago: The Godmother," published today in the New York Times Style Magazine, click here.

Update, December 2018: On a happy note, Judy Chicago is one of this year's Time Magazine "100 Most Influential People," with an essay by Jill Soloway, which you can access by clicking here.

And on a not-so-happy note, there are still people--particularly those self-identifying as Christian evangelicals, evidently--who find something to fear in the work of Judy Chicago. Although Chicago has made her home in Belen, New Mexico, for the last twenty-six years, living and working in the town of 7,000 (as well as establishing her arts organization, Through the Flower, there, hosting small exhibitions featuring the work female artists in New Mexico), some fearful town residents have objected to the idea of a proposed Judy Chicago museum there: "As Christians, we are for order, justice, security and protection,” in the words of just one such critic. “I’m for protecting the eyes of the innocent, especially the children.” Sigh. To read Simon Romero's "A Museum Honoring Judy Chicago, Star of Feminist Art? Not in This ‘Sleepy Little Town" (New York Times, 15 December 2018, click here.

Update, 19 September 2019: An interview with Judy Chicago, who has two current exhibitions (one in Los Angeles and one in Washington D.C.--the headline in the New York Times says it all: "Judy Chicago on Rescuing Women from Art History's Sidelines" (click here).

Update, 7 July 2021: The Fine Arts Institute of San Francisco has announced a new exhibition, "Judy Chicago: A Retrospective" (click here), "the first retrospective of her work" (28 August 2021-9 January 2022). Click here for an online view.

Update, 5 October 2021: Wow!!!! Here’s another “dinner party” I knew nothing about, Vanessa Bell and  Duncan Grant’s 1932 Famous Women Dinner Service! Check out the article in The Guardian noting a new exhibition by clicking here. On the art itself, the location of which was unknown for years, click here

Betty Friedan, the "Feminine Mystique," and the "Problem That Has No Name"

Betty Friedan (born 4 February 1921)

In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that is widely regarded as having ignited the second-wave feminist movement. She went on to help found the National Organization for Women.

Betty Friedan in 1995

In a perfect circle, Friedan was born on 4 February in 1921 and died on her eighty-fifth birthday, 4 February 2006. 

There are biographies, of course, and endless histories, assessments, and analyses. (This New York Times obituary gives a good summary of her life and work.

But there's also the book itself--it's a breathtaking read, available in paper and hardback copies, new and used, fancy fiftieth-anniversary deluxe editions and Norton Critical texts prepared for classroom use, digital download and audiobook. Get one! Read it! Enjoy! And then get angry!

Update, 4 February 2021: Noting the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth, the New York Times has published "Why We Can't Stop Talking about Betty Friedan": "A 100th birthday celebration in honor of the feminist raises the question: What was Ms. Friedan’s legacy exactly? ‘As with everything Betty, it’s complicated.’" 

 

Cover of the 1963 edition

Germaine Greer, Feminist Icon

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939)

Today is the birthday of irrepressible feminist powerhouse Germaine Greer. Greer's The Female Eunuch, published in 1970, contributed significantly to the Second Wave feminist movement and remains a crucial work for women today--not least for Greer's claim that women have no idea how much men hate them because women have been taught so effectively to hate themselves.

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them," she begins in a section of the book labelled "Loathing and Disgust." She continues, "Men do not themselves know the depth of their hatred," and her analysis of street harassment, domestic violence, and sexual assault sounds as if it was written yesterday instead of more than forty years ago. It's important to note that Greer does not let women off the hook for their ignorance, self-loathing, and complicity. If you haven't read it--or if you haven't read it in a while--now is the time. 

Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortune of Women Painters and Their Work (1979) is a crucial treatment of the difficulties women artists have faced throughout history--it is a source I've relied on quite frequently here in my postings on women artists. And I particularly like Greer's 2007 biography of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife. From the introduction: 

Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. 

She continues, "No one has ever undertaken a systematic review" of the life of Anne Hathaway--or her potential contributions to Shakespeare's life and work--"while every opportunity to caricature and revile her has been exploited to risible lengths." (For more on Anne Hathaway, click here.)

And here is from Greer's 2013 CNN essay, "Guilt Poisons Women":

Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive. Dirt and disorder in the family home is their fault, though they created none of it.

For Greer and her significance, "What Germain Greer and The Female Eunuch Mean to Me," here is an assessment offered by "six influential feminists" on the occasion of her seventy-fifty birthday in 2014.

Greer in 1970,
just after the publication of The Female Eunuch

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.