'Feminism Lives - Valerie Solanas.' Offset print signed in the impression. One framed print, one unframed and another framed screen-print, "The Future is Female." 17 x 11 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 18 1/2" (framed). This lot also includes a copy of SCUM by Valerie Solanas (Olympia Press paperback, 1970)

Betsy Warrior is an American author, activist and graphic artist. She was one of the original members of Cell 16, one of the earliest radical feminist organizations, which was based in Boston. Founded in 1968 by Roxanne Dunbar, Cell 16 envisioned women's liberation through separatism from men, celibacy, communal living and self-defense training. Warrior's activism as part of Cell 16 informed her graphic practice by producing posters in support of victims of domestic violence, wage justice for unpaid homeworkers and the "anti-rape movement."

For her 'Feminism Lives' screen-print, Warrior adapts the iconic portrait of Valerie Solanas photographed by Fred W. McDarrah in the Village Voice from 1967. A radical feminist author and aspiring playwright, Solanas is better-known for her assassination attempt on Andy Warhol. She had previously approached the pop artist to produce her play called "Up Your Ass" about the trials of a man-hating lesbian sex worker. Warhol later misplaced the original manuscript which fueled Solanas’s paranoid conviction that he intended to plagiarize her idea. On June 3,1968, Solanas arrived at The Factory armed, to exact her perceived revenge. She fired two shots at Warhol who sustained life-threatening, but non-fatal, injuries.

Solanas self-published her most notorious work, the SCUM Manifesto in 1967. Part feminist call to arms and scathing critique of patriarchy, part poetic and paranoid musings, SCUM remains one of the most idiosyncratic, if not controversial, texts in the corpus of feminist literature. When published by the New York-based Olympia Press in the following year, the title was rebranded as S.C.U.M: Society For Cutting Up Men. In her manifesto, Solanas deems that the ruling male sex has decimated the world and plagued it with war, disease and social inequality. SCUM calls for a woman-led restructuring of society to form a feminist utopia liberated from the tyranny of heterosexual capitalism (...and men)

According to the historian Sara Evans, initiates of Cell 16 purportedly read SCUM “as their first order of business”. Solanas’ agenda appealed to radical feminists who were committed to a complete overthrow of the patriarchal system as opposed to gaining certain rights within it. Betsy Warrior published an article “Man as an Obsolete Life Form” in the second edition of Cell 16’s No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation. Warrior shares Solanas’ belief in the dispensability of men in the fight for women’s liberation, specifically her model of feminist separatism which Cell 16 was pioneering at the time. Citation: Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A Knopf Inc., 1979), p. 209.

This copy of S.C.U.M. and the three other screen-prints come from the collection of Peter Gillis, a Boston teacher, inn keeper, queer and feminist activist, archivist, poet, collector. Gillis was friends with both Warrior, Abby Rockefeller and other Cell 16 founding members. The framed screen-print hung in his Boston townhouse where many activists and likeminded people met and socialized.

Requests for condition reports, additional photographs, or a video inspection can be obtained via email: info@Vallots.com (any condition statement given is offered as an opinion and should not be treated as a statement of fact). Every lot is sold as is, where is, and without warranty whether express or implied. All bids are final. We do not offer refunds.