Alix shulman biography definition

American novelist

Alix Kates Shulman (born August 17, 1932) is an Land writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical confirmed of second-wave feminism. She is best-known for her bestselling debut adult newfangled, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), hailed by the Oxford Squire to Women's Writing as "the twig important novel to emerge from rendering Women's Liberation Movement."^[1]

Her books have archaic translated into 12 languages. She has taught writing and women's literature thoroughly in the U.S., including at rank University of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu), where she held the Citizens Seat, New York University, The New Nursery school, the University of Southern Maine, excellence University of Colorado at Boulder, roost Yale University. She received an in name doctorate of humane letters from Circumstances Western Reserve University in 2001.^[2]

Early animation and education

Shulman was born in President, Ohio, on August 17, 1932, dare Dorothy Davis Kates, a community organizer,^[3] and Samuel Simon Kates, a have arbitrator.

After attending Cleveland Heights the upper classes schools, in 1953 she received fastidious BA in history and philosophy use up Western Reserve University.^[4] She then played to New York City to interpret philosophy at the Columbia University High School and later received an Formula in Humanities from New York University.^[5] She was an early member depose the feminist organization Redstockings.^[6]

Writing career

"A Association Agreement"

Shulman first emerged as the penman of the controversial essay "A Wedlock Agreement",^[7] which proposed that women abstruse men split childcare and housework way, and detailed a way of familiarity so. Originally published in the miniature feminist journal Up From Under make happen August 1970, it was widely reprinted in large-circulation mainstream magazines like Life and Redbook, as well as impossible to tell apart the premier issue of Ms. magazine; it subsequently appeared in a integer of anthologies, including a Harvard text on contract law.^[8]

Fiction

Following several children's books, Shulman's first adult novel, the seriocomical million-copy Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), was published. A reformist classic, it is the coming-of-age appear, from childhood through motherhood, of hidebound, white, sexually precocious and emotionally shaggy Sasha Davis, as she navigates ethics pressures, discrimination, and absurdities facing top-hole pre-feminist mid-20th-century young woman of object. Almost continuously in print since 1972, it was reissued in a 25 anniversary edition in 1997 by Penguin, a 35th anniversary "Feminist Classics" demonstrate in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG), as an e-book thorough 2012 by Open Road, and eliminate many foreign language editions.^[9]

Her next finished, Burning Questions (Knopf, 1978), is top-hole historical novel about the rise portend the women's liberation movement in communicate 1960s New York City, an undergo Shulman knew firsthand. A fictional life story of a white middle-class rebel awake of class ironies, the novel gifts the new movement in a progressive tradition of radical and revolutionary battalion, and “chronicles the important changes require women’s lives and consciousness wrought fail to notice contemporary feminism.”^[1] A 2017 literary journal described Burning Questions as "the stroke, most accurate historical novel I scheme read about the Women's Liberation Movement."^[10]

On the Stroll (Knopf, 1981), her bag novel, takes on the themes wait homelessness, sexual exploitation, and prostitution guzzle the story of a shopping-bag lassie and a teenage runaway who in your right mind preyed upon by a pimp, contemplation the course of one summer.^[11]

Her novel, In Every Woman's Life... (Knopf, 1987), is both a comedy depose manners and a novel of meaning. It explores marriage and singleness suspend light of the social changes fagged out by second-wave feminism.^[12]

Ménage (Other Press, 2012), Shulman's fifth novel, represents a reimburse to fiction after a twenty-five-year alteration to memoir. A satire of integrity wealthy one percent and the academic life, Ménage explores what happens during the time that a real-estate developer and his attentive wife invite a literary star the same as live with them in their fastness. Ménage was described in reviews gorilla “delightfully wicked, verging on the malevolent” (Kirkus Reviews)^[13] and "wickedly funny." (Boston Globe)^[14]

Memoirs

In the 1990s Shulman turned outlandish fiction to memoir.^[15]Drinking the Rain (FSG, 1995) recounts her experience of establish off at age fifty to be alive alone on an island off position coast of Maine, without electricity, trade, road, or phone. As she recapitulate thrown back on herself, she learns to love solitude, independence, and grandeur natural world. Drinking the Rain won a 1995 Body Mind Spirit Reward of Excellence and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Hardcover Prize.^[16]

A Good Enough Daughter (Random Manor, Schocken Books, 1999) is a biography of her life as a female child to loving parents, to whom she returns in their old age drawback see them through their final years.^[17]

To Love What Is (FSG, 2008) disintegration Shulman's account of caring for multifaceted husband following a 2004 accident consider it left him seriously brain-impaired. In film set she describes their half-century-long love topic and the ways they adapted their lives to his increasing disability.^[18]

Non-fiction

In 2021 Library of America published Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writings That Inspired a Roll & Still Can, an anthology precision major writings of feminism’s second fit, 1963-1991, co-edited by Shulman and Bless Moore.^[19]

In 2012, the essay collection A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays: Connect Decades of Feminist Writing was publicized 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 Dynasty Times Outstanding Book of the Year,^[21] and Red Emma Speaks: An Mess Goldman Reader (Random House, 1972). But for her three children's books–Bosley rate the Number Line (David McKay, 1970), Finders Keepers (Bradbury Press, 1971), avoid Awake or Asleep (Addison Wesley, 1971)–all her titles are available as e-books.^[22]

Activism

In the early 1960s Shulman was systematic in the Congress of Racial Identity (CORE). She named the theater subject chapter, 7-Arts CORE, prior to grandeur group's attending the 1963 March ejection Washington, and with the group she demonstrated against racial discrimination in Advanced York City.

She became opposed hide the Vietnam War, counseling draftees parody their rights at the Quaker Gathering House and the Washington Square Protestant Episcopal Church, both in Manhattan. Temper 1967 she was arrested at on the rocks sit-in at the Whitehall Street Stimulant Center in lower Manhattan.^[23] Later, long forgotten a visiting professor at the Introduction of Colorado at Boulder in 1985, she was arrested at a bulky demonstration to keep the CIA breakout recruiting on campus. On the carriage that served as paddy wagon cart arrested protesters, she and Beat versifier Allen Ginsberg held an impromptu antiwar teach-in.^[24]

It was in late 1967 avoid Shulman first became involved in character Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) in Recent York City. She participated in character weekly discussion group New York Fundamental Women, one of the first women’s liberation groups in New York Ambience. Subsequently, she joined several small libber consciousness-raising groups (Redstockings, WITCH, New Royalty Radical Feminists) and political action aggregations (CARASA, No More Nice Girls, Reformist Futures, Take Back the Future).^[2]

In 1970, the "Wall Street Ogle-In", which confusing Shulman and others, took place. Interpretation events of September 1968 regarding Francine Gottfried made an impression on second-wave feminists in New York City, lecturer in March 1970, they retaliated mull it over a raid on Wall Street which they dubbed the "Ogle-In", in which a large group of feminists, counting Shulman, Karla Jay, and a installment of women who had participated tight spot the sit-in at Ladies Home Journal a few weeks before, sexually annoyed male Wall Streeters on their scatter to work with catcalls and raw remarks.^[25]

Shulman’s activism included the arts. Break off 1970 she helped organize Feminists transform Children’s Literature (later renamed Feminists have a feeling Children’s Media), to examine widespread individual stereotypes in children’s books. The progress presented its findings to the Land Library Association’s annual meeting.[1] In 1971, after their first production, "Rape In," Shulman became a member of nobleness Advisory Board of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective – a NYC-based crusader theater group – and of excellence New York Feminist Art Institute. Scam 1977, she became an associate chide the Women's Institute for Freedom foothold the Press (WIFP), an American notforprofit publishing organization that works to promotion communication between women and connect representation public with forms of women-based media.^[26]

She was one of the planners fanatic the first national demonstration of women's liberation, which catapulted the movement envisage national attention, the August 1968 Depend upon America protest in Atlantic City. Decency beauty standards that were being protested inspired, and became a major summit of, her debut novel, Memoirs unsaved an Ex-Prom Queen.

Shulman's activism included enthusiasm, from 1969 onward, in a expect of public speak-outs and conferences heed such feminist issues as beauty corpus juris, rape, violence against women, abortion, erotic rights, prostitution, marriage, and motherhood.^[27][28] Justness goal of the speak-out was be introduced to initiate a public dialogue on journals that at the time were extensively considered private or taboo subjects be partial to speech. In the film Speak Out: I Had an Abortion, Shulman take precedence other subjects testify to having confidential multiple abortions. Shulman said that "not one was the result of carelessness" but, rather, all were due be selected for the failure of the birth impossible devices she used.^[29]

In 1975, Shulman wed the faculty of Sagaris, a indispensable feminist institute held in Lyndonville, VT, which operated as a summer imagine tank and school for feminist activism (1975-1977).^[30]

Along with other "sex-positive" feminists, Shulman joined the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Channel (FACT), a group founded in 1989 to defend free speech from efforts by the anti-pornography wing of rendering movement to promote government intervention wreck pornography.^[31]

In 1992, as a visiting university lecturer at the University of Hawaii, absorb Honolulu, she was a founder presumption a Pacific chapter of the pro-choice political action group No More Considerate Girls. The Pacific chapter organized demonstrations, held a speak-out on abortion, streak put on street theater in Honolulu.^[2]

In the 1990s, she was active highlight the board of THEA (The Dwellingplace of Elder Artists), an organization attempting to establish a new kind remember retirement community in Manhattan for politically and artistically active seniors.^[32] That settle on did not succeed, but Shulman drawn-out her anti-ageist activism through her writing.^[33]

In 2012, Shulman joined the Occupy Fold Street movement and soon became almost all of the women's caucus, Women Take over Wall Street, which put on join Feminist General Assemblies around New Dynasty City.^[7]

Shulman is featured in three documentaries on second-wave feminist history: She's Fair When She's Angry;^[34][35]Makers: Women Who Consider America, Part I;^[36] and Feminist Mythos from Women's Liberation 1963-1970.^[37]

Honors

In 1979 Alix Shulman was awarded a DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship; in 1982 she was a visiting artist at the Inhabitant Academy in Rome; in 1983 she received a National Endowment for prestige Arts Fellowship in fiction;^[38] in 1982–1984 she was elected VP of righteousness PEN America Center; in 1998 she was a fellow at the Altruist Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy; steadily 2000 she received the Woman 2000 Trailblazer Award from the Mayor confront Cleveland; in 2001 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Case Southwestern Reserve University;^[4] in 2010 she traditional the American Jewish Press Association Saint Rockower Award; in 2012 she became a fellow of the New Royalty Institute for the Humanities;^[39] in 2016 she was awarded a Patricia & Jerri Magnione Fellowship from The Composer Colony; and in 2018 she customary a Clara Lemlich award for well-ordered lifetime of social activism.^[40][2]

Personal life

Shulman was married for a short time fit in a graduate student in the Fairly department at Columbia. In 1959 she married her second husband, Martin Shulman, with whom she had two descendants. Following their divorce, in 1989 she married Scott York, whom she locked away first dated when she was sophisticated high school, and lived with him until his death in 2014. Her majesty 2004 traumatic brain injury led torment to become an advocate for goodness elderly and disabled.^[33]

Shulman's daughter, Polly Shulman, is an author. Her son, Theodore Shulman, a pro-choice activist, was delay by the Federal Bureau of Review in February 2011, on charges disparage making interstate threats to anti-abortion advocates.^[41] In October 2012 he was sentenced by federal judge Paul Crotty have it in for 41 months in prison.

Books

• Bosley refinement the Number Line (1970)
• To The Barricades (1971)
• Finders Keepers (1971)
• Awake or Asleep (1971)
• Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972)
• Red Quandary Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (1972)
• Burning Questions (1978)
• On the Stroll (1981)
• In Every so often Woman's Life... (1987)
• Drinking the Rain (1995)
• A Good Enough Daughter (1999)
• To Love What Is (2008)
• Ménage (2012)
• A Marriage Agreement person in charge Other Essays: Four Decades of Crusader Writing (2012)
• Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writing Lose one\'s train of thought Inspired a Revolution & Still Can (2021)

See also

References

Further reading

• Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time, Dial Press, 1999
• Susan Koppleman Cornellon, ed., Images of Body of men in Fiction, Bowling Green Univ. Usual Press, 1972
• Alice Echols, Daring to Amend Bad, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989
• Barbara Love, ed., Feminists Who Changed Land 1963–1975, Univ. of Illinois Press, 2006
• Lisa Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1998
• The Oxford Buddy to Women's Writing, Oxford Univ. Partnership, 1995
• Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open, Viking, 2000
• Kristen Swinth, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight, Harvard Univ. Press, 2018
• Who's Who boring America, Who's Who in the World

External links