SOLANAS, Valerie.

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SCUM Manifesto. First edition thus, printing the "SCUM Manifesto that would've been published in 1968 if I'd had my way". Solanas' provocative, radically feminist tract itemizes men's biological and social failings, and presents SCUM's (Society for Cutting Up Men) solutions to these: "overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex".Solanas wrote the text between 1965 and 1967, self-publishing mimeographed copies to distribute in New York (selling them for one dollar to women, two dollars to men). It was first formally published in 1968 by Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press, but he ignored Solanas's edits and amendments, much to her chagrin. When the Olympia Press went bankrupt a decade later, the copyright reverted to Solanas, and she was able to regain control of her text, publishing this victorious edition. WorldCat records only two institutional holdings, at Columbia University in the City of New York and at Harvard University.The controversial text, which has been interpreted both straightforwardly and as a parody of patriarchal philosophical tracts, has become notorious. Radical feminist activists of the time considered it "something no one else was articulating: a wild and uncompromising insistence that female subordination was utterly primal. What it voiced was new and profoundly compelling: incandescent, unladylike rage, which, once unleashed, fundamentally reshaped the women's movement" (Hamilton). In 1968

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