Alix Kates Shulman

Alix Kates Shulman (b. Aug. 17,1932) is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, as well as one of the early radical feminist activists of feminism's Second Wave. She is best known for her bestselling first novel, the 1972 Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf), "one of the first novels to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement" (Oxford Companion to Women's Writing), which was reissued in a 35th anniversary "Feminist Classics" edition in March 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG). She is also author of the controversial "A Marriage Agreement," which proposes that men and women split childcare and housework equally and details a method for doing so. First published in the feminist journal Up From Under in 1969, it was widely reproduced in magazines (Life, Redbook, Ms., New York) and anthologies, including a Harvard textbook on contract law, and in January 2007 was newly debated in the Washington Post Blog. Born in Cleveland, OH, she moved to New York City in 1953 to study philosophy at the Columbia University Graduate School. In 1967 she first became involved in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) in New York City by particpating 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). She was one of the planners of the first national demonstration of WLM, which catapulted WLM to national attention, the Aug 1968 Miss America Protest Demonstration in Atlantic City, a protest against oppressive beauty standards, which was a major theme of her first novel. In 1985 she helped found a Pacific branch of No More Nice Girls in Honolulu, HI. Her second novel, the 1978 Burning Questions (Knopf), recreates the rise of WLM and sets it in a historical context. By 2006 she was the author of 4 novels (Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Burning Questions, On the Stroll [Knopf, 1981], In Every Woman's Life... [Knopf, 1987]), 2 memoirs (Drinking the Rain [FSG, 1995], A Good Enough Daughter [Schocken, 1997]), 2 books on anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman (To The Barricades [T.Y.Crowell, 1971], Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader [Random House 1972]), and 3 children's books (Bosley on the Number Line[McKay, 1970], Finders Keepers [Bradbury Press, 1971], Awake or Asleep [Addison Wessley, 1971]). In 2007 she completed a new memoir, forthcoming in 2008 (FSG). She continues to teach and lecture widely on feminist themes.

References

• AlixKShulman.com
• Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, Univ. of Illinois Press, 2006
• Who's Who in America, 2005
• Lisa Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1998
• The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing, Oxford University Press, 1995
• Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad, Univ Minnesota Press, 1989

External Links

• [1] AlixKShulman.com
• Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution from the Jewish Women's Archive
• [2] podcast of interview with Alix Shulman on writing