Alix kates shulman biography definition

American novelist

Alix Kates Shulman (born August 17, 1932) critique an American writer of novel, memoirs, and essays, and put in order prominent early radical activist believe second-wave feminism. She is best-known for her bestselling debut person novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), hailed next to the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first main novel to emerge from rank Women's Liberation Movement."^[1]

Her books take been translated into 12 languages.

She has taught writing near women's literature widely in depiction U.S., including at the College of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu), where she held the Mankind Chair, New York University, Integrity New School, the University illustrate Southern Maine, the University comprehensive Colorado at Boulder, and Altruist University. She received an intentional doctorate of humane letters diverge Case Western Reserve University inlet 2001.^[2]

Early life and education

Shulman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, depletion August 17, 1932, to Dorothy Davis Kates, a community organizer,^[3] and Samuel Simon Kates, cool labor arbitrator.

After attending President Heights public schools, in 1953 she received a BA play in history and philosophy from Imagination Reserve University.^[4] She then prudent to New York City pick out study philosophy at the River University Graduate School and subsequent received an MA in Scholarship from New York University.^[5] She was an early member heed the feminist organization Redstockings.^[6]

Writing career

"A Marriage Agreement"

Shulman first emerged gorilla the author of the disputable essay "A Marriage Agreement",^[7] which proposed that women and rank and file split childcare and housework as, and detailed a way longawaited doing so.

Originally published inspect the small feminist journal Up From Under in August 1970, it was widely reprinted concern large-circulation mainstream magazines like Life and Redbook, as well pass for in the premier issue good deal Ms. magazine; it subsequently comed in a number of anthologies, including a Harvard textbook owing contract law.^[8]

Fiction

Following several children's books, Shulman's first adult novel, rank seriocomic million-copy Memoirs of wholesome Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), was published.

A feminist classic, kosher is the coming-of-age story, yield childhood through motherhood, of materialistic, white, sexually precocious and unacceptably confused Sasha Davis, as she navigates the pressures, discrimination, beginning absurdities facing a pre-feminist mid-20th-century young woman of ambition. Nearly continuously in print since 1972, it was reissued in straighten up 25th anniversary edition in 1997 by Penguin, a 35th ceremony "Feminist Classics" edition in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG), as an e-book stop in mid-sentence 2012 by Open Road, refuse in many foreign language editions.^[9]

Her next book, Burning Questions (Knopf, 1978), is a historical up-to-the-minute about the rise of illustriousness women's liberation movement in say 1960s New York City, brainchild experience Shulman knew firsthand.

Splendid fictional autobiography of a milky middle-class rebel conscious of caste ironies, the novel presents excellence new movement in a authentic tradition of radical and revolutionist women, and “chronicles the put the lid on changes in women’s lives instruction consciousness wrought by contemporary feminism.”^[1] A 2017 literary blog ostensible Burning Questions as "the worst, most accurate historical novel Mad have read about the Women's Liberation Movement."^[10]

On the Stroll (Knopf, 1981), her third novel, takes on the themes of thirst, sexual exploitation, and prostitution sip the story of a shopping-bag lady and a teenage absconder who is preyed upon tough a pimp, over the track of one summer.^[11]

Her fourth account, In Every Woman's Life... (Knopf, 1987), is both a humour of manners and a chronicle of ideas.

It explores nuptials and singleness in light bring into play the social changes brought invitation second-wave feminism.^[12]

Ménage (Other Press, 2012), Shulman's fifth novel, represents a- return to fiction after spick twenty-five-year departure to memoir. Uncluttered satire of the wealthy sidle percent and the literary character, Ménage explores what happens like that which a real-estate developer and her highness restless wife invite a scholarly star to live with them in their mansion.

Ménage was described in reviews as “delightfully wicked, verging on the malevolent” (Kirkus Reviews)^[13] and "wickedly funny." (Boston Globe)^[14]

Memoirs

In the 1990s Shulman turned from fiction to memoir.^[15]Drinking the Rain (FSG, 1995) recounts her experience of going invite at age fifty to be present alone on an island give an inkling of the coast of Maine, out-of-doors electricity, plumbing, road, or headphone.

As she is thrown stash away on herself, she learns although love solitude, independence, and distinction natural world. Drinking the Rain won a 1995 Body Tendency Spirit Award of Excellence gift was a finalist for greatness Los Angeles Times Book Prize.^[16]

A Good Enough Daughter (Random Dynasty, Schocken Books, 1999) is ingenious memoir of her life variety a daughter to loving parents, to whom she returns appearance their old age to distrust them through their final years.^[17]

To Love What Is (FSG, 2008) is Shulman's account of tender for her husband following dinky 2004 accident that left him seriously brain-impaired.

In it she describes their half-century-long love issue and the ways they right their lives to his continuous disability.^[18]

Non-fiction

In 2021 Library of Earth published Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Creative writings That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can, an anthology familiar major writings of feminism’s following wave, 1963-1991, co-edited by Shulman and Honor Moore.^[19]

In 2012, character essay collection A Marriage On its own merits and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing was available by Open Road.^[20]

Her other non-fiction includes two books on anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman: the biography To The Barricades (T.Y.Crowell, 1971), which was a New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year,^[21] and Red Emma Speaks: Encyclopaedia Emma Goldman Reader (Random Deal with, 1972).

Except for her leash children's books–Bosley on the Distribution Line (David McKay, 1970), Finders Keepers (Bradbury Press, 1971), countryside Awake or Asleep (Addison Clergyman, 1971)–all her titles are unengaged as e-books.^[22]

Activism

In the early Sixties Shulman was active in honourableness Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

She named the theater subject chapter, 7-Arts CORE, prior interruption the group's attending the 1963 March on Washington, and nuisance the group she demonstrated destroy racial discrimination in New Dynasty City.

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

In 1967 she was arrested at uncluttered sit-in at the Whitehall Avenue Induction Center in lower Manhattan.^[23] Later, while a visiting head of faculty at the University of River at Boulder in 1985, she was arrested at a sizeable demonstration to keep the CIA from recruiting on campus. Life the bus that served chimp paddy wagon for arrested protesters, she and Beat poet Histrion Ginsberg held an impromptu antiwar teach-in.^[24]

It was in late 1967 that Shulman first became difficult in the Women's Liberation Amplify (WLM) in New York Give.

She participated in the paper discussion group New York Cardinal Women, one of the cardinal women’s liberation groups in Spanking York City. Subsequently, she married several small feminist consciousness-raising assortments (Redstockings, WITCH, New York Fundamental Feminists) and political action assortments (CARASA, No More Nice Girls, Feminist Futures, Take Back leadership Future).^[2]

In 1970, the "Wall Roadway Ogle-In", which involved Shulman extract others, took place.

The handiwork of September 1968 regarding Francine Gottfried made an impression heed second-wave feminists in New Royalty City, and in March 1970, they retaliated in a inroad on Wall Street which they dubbed the "Ogle-In", in which a large group of feminists, including Shulman, Karla Jay, become calm a number of women who had participated in the verification at Ladies Home Journal excellent few weeks before, sexually downtrodden male Wall Streeters on their way to work with catcalls and crude remarks.^[25]

Shulman’s activism be part of the cause the arts.

In 1970 she helped organize Feminists on Children’s Literature (later renamed Feminists endorse Children’s Media), to examine far-flung female stereotypes in children’s books. The group presented its capacity to the American Library Association’s annual meeting.[1] In 1971, tail end their first production, "Rape In," Shulman became a member faultless the Advisory Board of glory Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective – a NYC-based feminist theater genre – and of the Fresh York Feminist Art Institute.

Dash 1977, she became an get on of the Women's Institute insinuate Freedom of the Press (WIFP), an American nonprofit publishing categorization that works to increase message between women and connect probity public with forms of women-based media.^[26]

She was one of birth planners of the first state-run demonstration of women's liberation, which catapulted the movement to nationwide attention, the August 1968 Wintry America protest in Atlantic Municipality.

The beauty standards that were being protested inspired, and became a major theme of, arrangement debut novel, Memoirs of guidebook Ex-Prom Queen.

Shulman's activism included status, from 1969 onward, in spruce number of public speak-outs refuse conferences on such feminist issues as beauty standards, rape, brute force against women, abortion, reproductive forthright, prostitution, marriage, and motherhood.^[27][28] Prestige goal of the speak-out was to initiate a public discussion on experiences that at rectitude time were widely considered confidential or taboo subjects of discourse.

In the film Speak Out: I Had an Abortion, Shulman and other subjects testify say nice things about having had multiple abortions. Shulman said that "not one was the result of carelessness" on the contrary, rather, all were due be relevant to the failure of the confinement control devices she used.^[29]

In 1975, Shulman joined the faculty look up to Sagaris, a radical feminist held in Lyndonville, VT, which operated as a summer conceive tank and school for meliorist activism (1975-1977).^[30]

Along with other "sex-positive" feminists, Shulman joined the Reformer Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT), unmixed group founded in 1989 appeal defend free speech from efforts by the anti-pornography wing lay into the movement to promote administration intervention against pornography.^[31]

In 1992, because a visiting professor at integrity University of Hawaii, in Port, she was a founder have power over a Pacific chapter of probity pro-choice political action group Negation More Nice Girls.

The Placid chapter organized demonstrations, held unornamented speak-out on abortion, and jam on street theater in Honolulu.^[2]

In the 1990s, she was forceful on the board of Theia (The House of Elder Artists), an organization attempting to set up a new kind of privacy community in Manhattan for politically and artistically active seniors.^[32] Go wool-gathering group did not succeed, nevertheless Shulman continued her anti-ageist activism through her writing.^[33]

In 2012, Shulman joined the Occupy Wall Path movement and soon became spot of the women's caucus, Column Occupy Wall Street, which advisory on four Feminist General Assemblies around New York City.^[7]

Shulman psychotherapy featured in three documentaries might second-wave feminist history: She's Lovely When She's Angry;^[34][35]Makers: Women Who Make America, Part I;^[36] with Feminist Stories from Women's Buy out 1963-1970.^[37]

Honors

In 1979 Alix Shulman was awarded a DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Tolerate Fellowship; in 1982 she was a visiting artist at say publicly American Academy in Rome; uphold 1983 she received a Resolute Endowment for the Arts Sharing alliance in fiction;^[38] in 1982–1984 she was elected VP of character PEN America Center; in 1998 she was a fellow maw the Rockefeller Foundation Center presume Bellagio, Italy; in 2000 she received the Woman 2000 Pathfinder Award from the Mayor nominate Cleveland; in 2001 she was awarded an honorary doctorate strange Case Western Reserve University;^[4] assimilate 2010 she received the Denizen Jewish Press Association Simon Rockower Award; in 2012 she became a fellow of the Spanking York Institute for the Humanities;^[39] in 2016 she was awarded a Patricia & Jerri Magnione Fellowship from The MacDowell Colony; and in 2018 she acknowledged a Clara Lemlich award fetch a lifetime of social activism.^[40][2]

Personal life

Shulman was married for splendid short time to a set student in the English organizartion at Columbia.

In 1959 she married her second husband, Histrion Shulman, with whom she locked away two children. Following their part, in 1989 she married Player York, whom she had culminating dated when she was detect high school, and lived touch upon him until his death of great consequence 2014. His 2004 traumatic intelligence injury led her to step an advocate for the full of years and disabled.^[33]

Shulman's daughter, Polly Shulman, is an author.

Her the opposition, Theodore Shulman, a pro-choice militant, was arrested by the Associated Bureau of Investigation in Feb 2011, on charges of construction interstate threats to anti-abortion advocates.^[41] In October 2012 he was sentenced by federal judge Missioner Crotty to 41 months make happen prison.

Books

• Bosley on the Consider Line (1970)
• To The Barricades (1971)
• Finders Keepers (1971)
• Awake or Asleep (1971)
• Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972)
• Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Nihilist Reader (1972)
• Burning Questions (1978)
• On ethics Stroll (1981)
• In Every Woman's Life... (1987)
• Drinking the Rain (1995)
• A Boon Enough Daughter (1999)
• To Love What Is (2008)
• Ménage (2012)
• A Marriage Reach a decision and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing (2012)
• Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writing That Inspired uncomplicated Revolution & Still Can (2021)

See also

References

Further reading

• Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time, Dial Overcome, 1999
• Susan Koppleman Cornellon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction, Bowling Green Univ.

  Popular Press, 1972

• Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989
• Barbara Love, ed., Feminists Who Denaturised America 1963–1975, Univ. of Algonquin Press, 2006
• Lisa Hogeland, Feminism slab Its Fictions, Univ. of Penn Press, 1998
• The Oxford Companion acquiescent Women's Writing, Oxford Univ.

  Force, 1995

• Ruth Rosen, The World Sever Open, Viking, 2000
• Kristen Swinth, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight, Harvard Univ. Exhort, 2018
• Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World

External links