Alix Kates Shulman

Alix Kates Shulman (born August 17, 1932) is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism.

Shulman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 17, 1932, to Dorothy Davis Kates, a community organizer, and Samuel Simon Kates, a labor arbitrator.

After attending Cleveland Heights public schools, in 1953 she received a BA in history and philosophy from Western Reserve University.

She then moved to New York City to study philosophy at the Columbia University Graduate School and later received an MA in Humanities from New York University.

She was an early member of the feminist organization Redstockings.

Shulman first emerged as the author of the controversial "A Marriage Agreement", which proposes that women and men split childcare and housework equally and details a method for doing so.

In the early 1960s Shulman was active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

She named the theater arts chapter, 7-Arts CORE, prior to the group's attending the 1963 March on Washington, and with the group she demonstrated against racial discrimination in New York City.

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

In 1967 she was arrested at a sit-in at the Whitehall Street Induction Center in lower Manhattan.

Originally published in the feminist journal Up From Under in 1969, it was widely reproduced in magazines (Life, Redbook, the premier issue of Ms.) and anthologies, including a Harvard textbook on contract law.

Except for her three children's books–Bosley on the Number Line (David McKay, 1970), Finders Keepers (Bradbury Press, 1971), and Awake or Asleep (Addison Wesley, 1971)–all her titles are available as e-books.

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, and Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (Random House, 1972).

She is best-known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."

Her books have been translated into 12 languages.

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, New York University, The New School, the University of Southern Maine, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Yale University.

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

A feminist classic, it is the coming-of-age story, from childhood through motherhood, of middle-class, white, sexually precocious and emotionally confused Sasha Davis, as she navigates the pressures, discrimination, and absurdities facing a pre-feminist mid-20th-century young woman of ambition.

Almost continuously in print since 1972, it was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 1997 by Penguin, a 35th anniversary "Feminist Classics" edition in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG), as an e-book in 2012 by Open Road, and in many foreign language editions.

Her next book, Burning Questions (Knopf, 1978), is a historical novel about the rise of the women's liberation movement in late 1960s New York City, an experience Shulman knew firsthand.

On the Stroll (Knopf, 1981), her third novel, takes on the themes of homelessness, sexual exploitation, and prostitution through the story of a shopping-bag lady and a teenage runaway who is preyed upon by a pimp, over the course of one summer.

Later, while a visiting professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1985, she was arrested at a large demonstration to keep the CIA from recruiting on campus.

On the bus that served as paddy wagon for arrested protesters, she and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg held an impromptu antiwar teach-in.

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

It explores marriage and singleness in light of the social changes brought by second-wave feminism.

In the 1990s Shulman turned from fiction to memoir.

Drinking the Rain (FSG, 1995) recounts her experience of going off at age fifty to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine, without electricity, plumbing, road, or phone.

As she is thrown back on herself, she learns to love solitude, independence, and the natural world.

Drinking the Rain won a 1995 Body Mind Spirit Award of Excellence and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

A Good Enough Daughter (Random House, Schocken Books, 1999) is a memoir of her life as a daughter to loving parents, to whom she returns in their old age to see them through their final years.

She received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Case Western Reserve University in 2001.

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

In it she describes their half-century-long love affair and the ways they adapted their lives to his increasing disability.

In 2021 Library of America published Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can, an anthology of major writings of feminism’s second wave, 1963-1991, co-edited by Shulman and Honor Moore.

Ménage (Other Press, 2012), Shulman's fifth novel, represents a return to fiction after a twenty-five-year departure to memoir.

A satire of the wealthy one percent and the literary life, Ménage explores what happens when a real-estate developer and his restless wife invite a literary star to live with them in their mansion.

Ménage was described in reviews as “delightfully wicked, verging on the malevolent” (Kirkus Reviews) and "wickedly funny."

(Boston Globe)

In 2012, the essay collection A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing was published by Open Road.

A fictional autobiography of a white middle-class rebel conscious of class ironies, the novel presents the new movement in a historical tradition of radical and revolutionary women, and “chronicles the important changes in women’s lives and consciousness wrought by contemporary feminism.” A 2017 literary blog described Burning Questions as "the best, most accurate historical novel I have read about the Women's Liberation Movement."