Valerie Solanas - Early Life

Early Life

Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey, to Louis Solanas and Dorothy Biondo in 1936. Her father was a bartender and her mother, a dental assistant or a nurse. She had a younger sister, Judith A. Solanas Martinez.

Solanas claimed she regularly suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother remarried shortly afterwards. Solanas disliked her stepfather and began rebelling against her mother, becoming a truant. As a child, she wrote insults for children to use on one another, for the cost of a dime. She beat up a boy in high school who was bothering a younger girl, and also hit a nun. Because of her rebellious behavior, her mother sent her to be raised by her grandparents in 1949. Solanas claimed her grandfather was a violent alcoholic who often beat her. When she was 15, she left her grandparents and became homeless. Between 1951 and 1953, she gave birth to a son, fathered by a married man or a sailor. The child, named David (later, David Blackwell, by adoption), was taken away from Solanas and she never saw him again.

Despite this, she graduated from high school on time and earned a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was in the Psi Chi Honor Society. While at the University of Maryland, she hosted a call-in radio show where she gave advice on how to combat men. She was also an open lesbian, despite the conservative cultural climate of the 1950s.

She attended the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Psychology, where she worked in the psychology department's animal research laboratory, before dropping out and moving to attend Berkeley for a few courses, when she began writing the SCUM Manifesto.