Overthrowing the Government and Destroying the Male Sex
SOLANAS, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. London: The Olympia Press. 1971.
8vo. Publisher’s photographic wrappers with printed price of 25p to front, photograph of the author by Fred W. McDarrah; pp. [2], xxxvi, [2 (blank)], 52; wrapper a little scuffed especially to rear, toning to edges of textblock; very good.
First UK edition, first impression, of the manifesto for the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM), first distributed by publisher and radical feminist Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) as a self-published booklet in New York between 1965 and 1967.
After her shooting of Andy Warhol in 1968, Maurice Girodias, the owner of the Olympia Press, rushed out an American edition featuring some textual differences and an introduction by Vivian Gornick.
Whatever her professed motives for shooting Warhol (whom she believed was conspiring to appropriate her work), and whether the text’s violence is satirical or sincere, her manifesto articulates an uncompromisingly radical rejection of patriarchal society: ‘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’ (p. 3)
SKU: 2124223