The Divine Mr. M

~I had been planing on an essay about how these six women laid the foundations of The Sisterhood, but it has proved to be a daunting task. And I need to get the first edition of the Liber published. So I’m punting.

I’ll write said essay for a later edition. For now, here is the opening text from their respective Wikis with links to same…

Shulamith “Shulie” Firestone (January 7, 1945 – August 28, 2012)[2] was a Canadian-American radical feminist. A central figure in the early development of radical feminism and second-wave feminism, Firestone was a founding member of three radical-feminist groups: New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists.

In 1970, Firestone authored The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Published in September of that year, the book became an influential feminist text.[3]Naomi Wolf said of the book in 2012: “No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory, second-wave landmark.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulamith_Firestone

Donna J. Haraway (born September 6, 1944) is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States.[1] She is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, described in the early 1990s as a “feminist, rather loosely a postmodernist”.[2] Haraway is the author of numerous foundational books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985) and “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988).[3][4] She is also a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism, associated with post-humanism and new materialism movements.[5][6] Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.[7]

Haraway has taught Women’s Studies and the History of Science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. Haraway’s works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology.[8] Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway’s book Modest_Witness for which she received the Society for Social Studies of Science’s (4S) Ludwik Fleck Prize in 1999.[9][10] In September 2000, Haraway was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science’s highest honor, the J. D. Bernal Award, for her “distinguished contributions” to the field.[11] Haraway serves on the advisory board for numerous academic journals, including differences, , Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and Environmental Humanities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway

Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women. Her views were widely criticized by liberal feminists and others. At the same time, she maintained a dialogue with political conservatives, and wrote a topically related book, Right-Wing Women. After suffering abuse from her first husband, she was introduced to radical feminist literature, and began writing Woman Hating.

After moving to New York, she became an activist and a writer on several issues, eventually publishing 10 books on feminism.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Dworkin became known as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on pornography and sexuality, particularly Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), which remain her two most widely known books. She wrote on pornography from a feminist perspective and in opposition to obscenity law, and she worked with Women Against Pornography and Linda Boreman. She considered the pornography industry to be based on turning women into objects for abuse by men. Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon developed a legislative approach based on civil rights rather than obscenity to outlaw pornography and allow lawsuits against pornographers for damages, but their efforts were largely unsuccessful. She testified at a federal commission against pornography, leading some stores to withdraw certain magazines from sale, but a court ruled the government’s efforts unconstitutional. Critics argued that no causal relationship between pornography and harm to women had been found. In 1992, a Canadian court adapted parts of Dworkin and MacKinnon’s theory on sex equality, although Dworkin opposed parts of the court’s view. Some sex-positive feminists criticized Dworkin’s views as censorious and as denying women’s agency or choice in sexual relationships, leading to the so-called feminist sex wars.

Her book Intercourse, which addresses the role of sexual intercourse in society, has been interpreted as opposing all heterosexual intercourse, but Dworkin said it does not and that what she was against was male domination by intercourse. Some critics of Dworkin accused her of supporting incest, and she sued for defamation, but a court did not forbid the criticism. She subsequently wrote much in opposition to incest. She wrote some fiction, some of which was held for a time by Canadian customs authorities before it was released, giving rise to a controversy over whether her support for antipornography law had led to the seizure of her own work. When she said she was drugged and raped in a hotel in 1999, controversy over the truth of the allegations followed. In her later years, she suffered from severe osteoarthritis, which limited her mobility. She died of acute myocarditis at the age of 58.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin

Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is an American radical feminist legal scholar. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.[1][2]

As an expert on international law, constitutional law, political and legal theory, and jurisprudence, MacKinnon focuses on women’s rights and sexual abuse and exploitation, including sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, sex trafficking and pornography. She was among the first to argue that pornography is a civil rights violation, and that sexual harassment in education and employment constitutes sex discrimination.[1][3]

MacKinnon is the author of over a dozen books, including Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979);[4]Feminism Unmodified (1987), described as “one of the most widely cited books on law in the English language”;[5]Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989); Only Words (1993); a casebook, Sex Equality (2001 and 2007); Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2005); and Butterfly Politics (2017).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharine_MacKinnon

Susannah Bright, also known as Susie Sexpert (born March 25, 1958), is an American feminist, author, journalist, critic, editor, publisher, producer, and performer, often on the subject of sexual politics and sexuality.[1]

She is one of the first writers/activists referred to as a sex-positive feminist.[2] Her papers are part of the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University Library along with the archives of On Our Backs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susie_Bright

Valerie Jean Solanas (April 9, 1936 – April 25, 1988) was an American radical feminist and author best known for writing the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and attempting to murder Andy Warhol in 1968.

Solanas had a turbulent childhood. She said her father regularly sexually abused her and she had a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather after her parents’ divorce. She was sent to live with her grandparents but ran away after being physically abused by her alcoholic grandfather. Solanas came out as a lesbian in the 1950s. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, Solanas relocated to Berkeley, California, where she began writing her most notable work, the SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex”.[1][2]

Solanas moved to New York City in the mid-1960s. She met pop artist Andy Warhol and asked him to produce her play Up Your Ass. She gave him her script, which she later accused him of losing or stealing. After Solanas demanded financial compensation for the lost script, Warhol hired her to perform in his film, I, a Man, paying her $25. In 1967, Solanas began self-publishing the SCUM Manifesto. Olympia Press owner Maurice Girodias offered to publish Solanas’s future writings, and she understood the contract to mean that Girodias would own her writing. Convinced that Girodias and Warhol were conspiring to steal her work, Solanas purchased a gun in early 1968.

On June 3, 1968, she went to The Factory, where she found Warhol. She shot at Warhol three times, the first two shots missing and the third wounding Warhol. She also shot art critic Mario Amaya and attempted to shoot Warhol’s manager, Fred Hughes, point blank, but the gun jammed. Solanas then turned herself in to the police. She was charged with attempted murder, assault, and illegal possession of a gun. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and pleaded guilty to “reckless assault with intent to harm”, serving a three-year prison sentence, including treatment in a psychiatric hospital. After her release, she continued to promote the SCUM Manifesto. She died in 1988 of pneumonia in San Francisco.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Solanas

The Sisterhood is not in total alignment with the philosophies/ideologies of these six women. In fact a few of them might reject SH in whole or in part. But without their work, SH would not, likely could not, exist.