Born: August 17, 1932, Cleveland Heights, Ohio
Known for: feminist activism and her novel Memoirs of an Ex Prom Queen
Occupation: writer, teacher, and lecturer; author of novels, memoirs, articles, and essays
Alix Kates Shulman is a feminist who has written for decades about the concerns of women in both fiction and non-fiction. Born Alix Kates in 1932, she grew up in Ohio and went on to attend graduate school in New York City and become part of the Women's Liberation Movement.
Education and Early Feminism
After Alix Kates Shulman earned her bachelor's degree at Flora Stone Mather College (now part of Case Western Reserve University), she studied mathematics and philosophy at Columbia. She discovered that both were male-dominated professions and became discouraged by her lack of prospects for a successful career. She worked as an encyclopedia editor and eventually began writing and teaching.
Among Alix Kates Shulman's most famous novels is her bestselling Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, published in 1972. She writes of a girl like herself, raised in the Midwest, who must contend with the expectations of women in the 20th-century middle class United States. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen has been repeatedly praised as the first important feminist novel because it involves many central concerns of second-wave feminism: beauty standards, abortion, date rape, sexual harassment, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and society's expectations about women's ambition.
Activism
Alix Kates Shulman was quite involved in the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, working for feminism and civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War. She instantly connected with the ideals of Women's Liberation when she encountered the movement. She described consciousness-raising as the way that women learned about their true condition, using their lives to discover what had been hidden by dishonesty.
Alix Kates Shulman was a member of the radical feminist groups Redstockings, WITCH, and New York Radical Feminists. She was part of the 1968 Miss America Protest and the abortion rights street theater protest group No More Nice Girls.
Activist Writings
In 1969, Alix Kates Shulman wrote an article called "A Marriage Agreement" that proposed men and women share housework and childcare equally. This was such a radical notion that the article was widely reprinted and generated a notable reader response. She has credited the publicity from her article for generating enough interest to start a bidding war over publishing Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.
Alix Kates Shulman's novels Burning Questions and On the Stroll deal with a range of women's experiences, from a rebellious feminist's political awakening to a teenage runaway recruited to be a prostitute in New York City. She also wrote two books about activist anarchist Emma Goldman.
Memoirs of Personal Experience
Alix Kates Shulman grew up in a comfortable middle-class home she later called "bourgeois." Her father was a lawyer and her mother a feminist and aspiring writer. When she left for New York, she specifically wanted to become independent, removing herself from her "middle America" family life. Decades later, Alix Kates Shulman returned to her childhood home and published A Good Enough Daughter about the experience of caring for her aged parents as they approached death.
Alix Kates Shulman's first husband was a graduate student in the English department at Columbia; the marriage did not last. In 1959 she married her second husband, Martin Shulman, with whom she had two children. They divorced after 25 years. Her 1987 novel Every Woman's Life suggests that every woman at some point in her life has to think about marriage.
Alix Kates Schulman married Scott York in 1989. She had originally known him when she wasa young woman in college; they met again and rekindled their relationship during the 1980s. After years of living as happy, autonomous partners, he was injured in a fall and suffered brain damage. She recounts the experience of caring for him in her 2008 book To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed.
Alix Kates Shulman is the recipient of several arts awards and fellowships as well as an honorary doctorate from Case Western Reserve University.