Alix Kates Shulman (given name Alix Audrey Kates) was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932 to Dorothy Davis Kates and Samuel Kates. Raised in suburban Cleveland Heights, she graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 1953 with a degree in English and History. She moved to New York City after college and began graduate studies at Columbia University where she met and married fellow graduate student Marcus Klein in 1954. After marriage she began a series of research, editorial and writing jobs. She and Klein were divorced in 1958, and she then married Martin Shulman in 1959. She gave birth to her son Ted in 1961 and to her daughter Polly in 1963.
Shulman became involved in the early women's liberation movement groups in New York City in the late 1960s. She participated in the famed Miss America Pageant Protest in Atlantic City in 1968, was an early member of the groups Redstockings and WITCH in 1969, and joined the New York Radical Women in 1970. At approximately the same time she became active in the women's liberation movement, Shulman began her literary career, publishing articles in both feminist and mainstream periodicals, and publishing a number of children's books and non-fiction books about Emma Goldman. She and Martin Shulman drafted a Marriage Agreement which was published in the feminist journal Up From Under in 1970. The Agreement was re-printed with accompanying articles in Redbook (in 1971) and then in Life (1972). Due to these re-printings, the Agreement received much press and raised much controversy. It was attacked by, among others, Norman Mailer and Russell Baker. Also in 1972, Shulman published her first major (and semi-autobiographical) novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Memoirs became a national best seller, raised much debate about the growing feminist movement and the situation of women in U.S. society, and launched Shulman's writing career on a national level.
Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Shulman continued to work as a feminist activist, to write essays and short stories for a wide variety of journals and newspapers, to teach and present speeches and conference papers, and to publish novels and memoirs. She divorced Martin Shulman in 1985 and married former Cleveland Heights High School classmate Scott York in 1989. Her two most recently published books are Drinking the Rain (1995), an account of her solitary, non-technological life on a Maine island, and A Good Enough Daughter (1999), a memoir focusing on her relationships with her late parents. She received an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from Case Western Reserve University in 2001.
From the guide to the Alix Kates Shulman Papers, 1892-2000, (bulk 1968-2000), (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)
