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"). The novel examines the contradictions and pressures on a young woman of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s through the story of Sasha Davis from childhood through marriage and motherhood. Almost continually in print, it was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 1997 by Penguin and in a 35th anniversary "Feminist Classics" edition in 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. It continues to be debated, for instance in January 2007 in a "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 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). 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 "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen." 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. Her third novel, "On the Stroll" [Knopf, 1981] , takes on the themes of homelessness and abuse through the story of a shopping-bag lady and a teen-age runaway who is preyed upon by a pimp over the course of one summer. Her fourth novel, "In Every Woman's Life..." [Knopf, 1987] ), explores marriage, children, and singleness in a contemporary comedy of manners. After that, in her next three books, she turned to memoirs: "Drinking the Rain" [FSG, 1995] , about her experience of living alone on an island without electricity, road, or phone, as she undergoes a midlife change; "A Good Enough Daughter" [Schocken, 1997] , about her life as a daughter to loving parents whom she sees through their deaths; and "To Love What Is" [FSG, 2008] , an account of caring for her husband following a 2004 accident that left him seriously brain-impaired. In addition, she has written two books on anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman ("To The Barricades" [T.Y.Crowell, 1971] , "Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader" [Random House 1972] ), and three children's books ("Bosley on the Number Line" [McKay, 1970] , "Finders Keepers" [Bradbury Press, 1971] , "Awake or Asleep" [Addison Wessley, 1971] ).

She has taught writing and women's literature widely in the U.S., including at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu) where she held the Citizens Chair in 1991-2. She received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Case Western Reserve University in 2001.

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

* [http://www.AlixKShulman.com] AlixKShulman.com
* [http://www.jwa.org/feminism/?id=JWA064 Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution] from the [http://www.jwa.org Jewish Women's Archive]
* [http://writersonwriting.blogspot.com/2007/02/alix-kates-shulman.html] podcast of interview with Alix Shulman on writing