When Valerie Solanas died in 1988 in a welfare hotel in San Francisco, she left a sharply polarised legacy: reviled by many as a demented groupie for her near-fatal 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol and revered by a few as a feminist visionary for her incendiary 1967 diatribe the _SCUM_ Manifesto. This paper explores Solanas's collisions with the art world and the women's liberation movement and asks how her ideas, actions, and experience of mental illness illuminate the shadows of feminist history.
