S.C.U.M. Manifesto

S.C.U.M. Manifesto is presented in the diaries not through its text or arguments but through a dispute over its circulation. In two entries, the work surfaces in accounts of Valerie Solanas and of a person who had included it in a book about women’s liberation; Solanas’s reported response was to seek that person’s address and consider shooting or suing them.

The Manifesto in Circulation

In one entry, the narrator reports that Howard Smith of The Village Voice had been writing letters to Valerie Solanas, whom he may have encountered in Greenwich Village. Smith regretted having begun the correspondence and wondered how someone he considered so disturbed could be walking the streets. The narrator answered with the suggestion that Solanas might have worked for the CIA—a speculative aside, not evidence about her or the manifesto.

The work becomes more directly central in a later entry, dated November 6, 1977. David Bourdon called to say that Solanas had just called him. She wanted the address of someone who had put her S.C.U.M. Manifesto into a book on women’s liberation, and, as Bourdon relayed it, was considering shooting or suing that person. The diary establishes the immediate grievance—the manifesto’s inclusion in another book—but does not identify the person or the book.

What the Entries Establish

The episodes frame the manifesto as a text whose appearance in a book could provoke a personal and potentially violent response from Solanas. The first account places her within a web of letters and uneasy conversations; the second makes the dispute over attribution or inclusion explicit. Neither entry reports that Solanas carried out either threat, and the record provides no further outcome.

The diary offers no description of the manifesto’s contents, its publication history, or the circumstances in which it was included in the women’s-liberation book. Its significance here is therefore limited but sharply defined: it becomes the object around which the entries register Solanas’s anger and the reactions of people discussing her.