Alix Kates Shulman - Political Activism

Political Activism

In the early 1960s Shulman was active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She named the theater arts chapter "7-Arts CORE" prior to the group's attending the 1963 March on Washington.

She became opposed to the Vietnam War, counseling draftees on their rights at the Quaker Meeting House and the Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church, both in Manhattan.

In 1967 Shulman first became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) in New York City by participating in the monthly discussion group, New York Radical Women; she subsequently joined several small consciousness raising women's groups (Redstockings, WITCH, New York Radical Feminists), and feminist political action groups (CARASA, No More Nice Girls, Feminist Futures, Take Back the Future). In 1971, after their first production, ""Rape In"". she became a member of the Advisory Board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective - a NYC based feminist theater group. She was one of the planners of the first national demonstration of WLM, which catapulted WLM to national attention, the August 1968 Miss America protest in Atlantic City, a demonstration against oppressive beauty standards, which was a major theme of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.

Shulman's activisim included participation, beginning in 1969 and continuing to the present day, in a number of public speak-outs and conferences on such feminist issues as beauty standards, rape, violence against women, reproductive choice, marriage, and motherhood. The goal of the speak-out was to initiate a public dialogue on experiences that at the time were widely considered taboo subjects of speech. In the film Speak Out: I Had an Abortion, Shulman and other subjects testify to having had multiple abortions. Shulman said that "not one was the result of carelessness" but rather were due to the failure of the birth control devices she used.

In 1992, as a Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, she was a founder of a Pacific chapter of the group No More Nice Girls. The Pacific chapter organized demonstrations, held a speak-out, and put on street theater in Honolulu. In the 1990s she was active on the board of THEA (The House of Elder Artists), an organization attempting to establish a new kind of retirement community in Manhattan for politically and artistically active seniors.