Kate Millett

American feminist writer

• Born: September 14, 1934
• Birthplace: St. Paul, Minnesota
• Died: September 6, 2017
• Place of death: Paris, France

Millett’s best-selling 1970 book Sexual Politics is considered by many a feminist manifesto. Her main thesis is that gender is a political category with status implications. In effect, what is largely unexamined in the social order is the assumption that men and boys are to have power over women and girls as a birthright.

Early Life

Kate Millett (MIHL-leht) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her father, James Albert Millett, was an engineer, and her mother, Helen Feely Millett, was a teacher. The family’s background was Irish Catholic. Her father deserted the family when Kate was fourteen years old. After attending parochial schools with dwindling faith and increasing rebelliousness, Millett attended the University of Minnesota, where she received her bachelor’s degree in English, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in 1956.

A rich aunt, who was disturbed by Millett’s increasing tendency to defy convention, offered to send her to Oxford University for graduate study. For two years, Millett studied English literature at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, and she received first-class honors in 1958, the first American woman to achieve that distinction. Returning to the United States, she obtained her first job, teaching English at the University of North Carolina. Midsemester, she quit her position and moved to New York City to paint and sculpt. In New York, she rented a loft to serve as her studio and living quarters, and to support herself she worked as a file clerk in a bank and as a kindergarten teacher in Harlem.

From 1961 to 1963, Millett sculpted and taught English at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. She had her first one-woman show at the Minami Gallery in Tokyo. While in Japan, she met her future husband, Fumio Yoshimura, also a sculptor. They married in 1965 and divorced in 1985. In 1968, she returned to academic life, working for her PhD in English and comparative literature at Columbia University while teaching English in the university’s undergraduate school for women, Barnard College.

Life’s Work

At Columbia University, Millett’s concern with politics and women’s rights began to develop and deepen. After returning from Japan, she joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the peace movement. In 1965, the campaign for women’s rights attracted her attention and energies. At Columbia, she was a vocal organizer for women’s rights and a champion of other progressive causes, including abortion rights and student rights. On December 23, 1968, because her activism made her unpopular with the Barnard College administration, she was relieved of her teaching position.

In its original form, Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) was a short manifesto she read to a meeting of feminists at Cornell University in November 1968. In February 1969, however, Millett began to develop the manifesto into her doctoral dissertation. Working on it with undivided attention, she finished it in September 1969 and successfully defended it to receive her doctorate the following March. She was awarded the degree with distinction.

Few doctoral dissertations are published outside the academic community, and fewer still become best sellers, but Sexual Politics was a huge success, going through seven printings and selling eighty thousand copies in its first year on the market. Although some reviews of Sexual Politics were decidedly hostile, especially because Millett argues that patriarchy and the institution of marriage in its traditional form should be ended, most critics have judged the book to be a scholarly political analysis of gender tensions and relations.

Sexual Politics is divided into three sections. The first, which deals with theories and examples of sexual politics, establishes the fundamental thesis that sex (gender) is a political category with status implications. Millett argues that what is largely unexamined in the social order is an automatically assumed priority whereby males rule females as a birthright. In monogamous marriage and the nuclear family, women and children are treated primarily as property belonging to men. Working-class women are exploited and reduced to a source of cheap labor, while middle-class and upper-class women are forced into a parasitical existence, dependent for food and favor on the ruling men. When the system is most successful, Millett argues, it results in an interior colonization the creation of a slavelike mentality in which women are devoted to their masters and the institutions that keep them in bondage.

The second part of Sexual Politics discusses the historical background of the subjugation of women and of women’s freedom. The section begins with an account of the first phase of the sexual revolution, which started about 1830 and ended, abortively, in reform rather than revolution, when women in the United States won suffrage. Going on to analyze the counterrevolution, Millett identifies Sigmund Freud as its archvillain. She dismisses as a male supremacist bias Freud’s theory that so-called penis envy is the basis for women’s masochism and passivity and that fear of castration is the basis for men’s greater success at repressing instinctual drives and therefore attaining higher cultural achievement. She also examines and rejects Erik Erickson’s theory of so-called womb envy, among other versions of anatomy-is-destiny thought.

In the third and final section of her book, Millett examines four major modern writers insofar as they reflect the sexual politics of Western society. D. H. Lawrence considered women at their most “womanly,” that is, as willing subjects and sacrifices to male creative power. Henry Miller saw women only as sexual partners and considered the ideal sexual partner not as a person but as an object, a genital playground designed solely to fulfill male needs. Norman Mailer was a prisoner of the cult of virility, to whom sexuality meant sadism, violence, and usually sodomy as well. Only in Jean Genet, the French chronicler of the underworld of gay culture, does Millett find a sympathetic understanding of the social and cultural position of women. She argues that in Genet’s portrayal of the hatred and hostility directed at gay “queens” there is a mirror image and intentional parody of gender relations in heterosexual society.

After Sexual Politics, Millett participated in a wide range of feminist activities, including the arts. In 1970, she partially financed and directed an all-woman crew in the production of a low-budget documentary film about the lives of three women. Although Three Lives was intended for college and other noncommercial audiences, it was premiered at a New York City theater late in 1971 and received generally excellent reviews. Millett then taught a course on the sociology of women once a week at Bryn Mawr College.

Millett also supported women’s rights groups, from the National Organization for Women to Radical Lesbians. She was involved in attempts to organize prostitutes, and in August 1970 she took part in the symbolic seizing of the Statue of Liberty in celebration of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination because of gender, by the House of Representatives. (The amendment ultimately failed to be ratified by enough states to become law.)

Sexual Politics removed Millett from the anonymity of the New York art world and established her as a widely interviewed spokesperson for the women’s movement. Within months, however, the author realized that she could not control the image of herself that was projected by the press and on television. For example, Time magazine featured Millett on the cover of its August 31, 1970, issue on “The Politics of Sex.” In an unsigned article introducing the issue, Time editors wrote that she was the “Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.” Mailer, the epitome of sexism for Millett, lashed out at her in response in his own magazine piece, dismissing her as a “literary Molotov” intent on creating a new brand of prudery. In the middle of her excessive celebrity, Millett found herself unsuited to life as a talk-show exhibit, but she did not quit the scene, even though it seemed to her that the media exposure was largely a sordid fraud. Once recognized as an articulate member of the women’s movement, she had somehow ceased to be a free agent.

In her uncomfortable new spokeswoman status, she was urged by other women to speak out on their behalf, while, at the same time, she faced browbeating and harassment for her arrogance and elitism in presuming to do so. Millett’s next book, Flying (1974), details her struggle to remain self-aware, personally happy, and productive in the face of all the publicity she was receiving as a result of Sexual Politics. The central theme of Flying, as well as that of her 1977 memoir Sita , is her lesbian sexuality and the effect that her honest admission of her sexuality had on her public and private life. The extent of the publicity attached to Millett was so intense that her greatest desire after the publication of Sexual Politics was to reconstruct some sort of private personality for herself after the glare of the cameras had begun to fade. In 1979, she went to Iran on a mission to help women there but was soon told to leave the country. She describes the experience in Going to Iran, published in 1982.

With these autobiographical works finished, Millett turned to a topic that had haunted her for more than ten years: the brutal torture and murder of an Indianapolis teenager named Sylvia Likens. The Basement , released in 1980, offers a chilling chronology of Likens’s last months, from her point of view as well as that of her killers. The book combined reporting, a look into the consciousness of each person involved in the crime, and a feminist analysis of power in order to follow human realities wherever they might lead. What emerges is not only the story of an isolated incident but also that of the powerlessness of children, the imposition of sexual shame on adolescent girls, and the ways in which a woman is used to break the spirit and body of younger women. Clearly, the fourteen years that Millett spent pondering Sylvia’s fate and how to detail it enhance the book’s value. Quite apart from any feminist polemics, The Basement can stand alone as an intensely felt and movingly written study of the problems of cruelty and submission. The Loony-Bin Trip (1990) recounts the ordeals of Millett’s involuntary hospitalizations in psychiatric wards for bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression), her divorce from Yoshimura, and the painful efforts she made to reconstruct her personal and public identities despite her illness.

In The Politics of Cruelty (1994), Millett considers the widespread use of torture more generally, drawing from photographs, films, literature, and testimonies of victims for her evidence. She argues for popular pressure to end torture, concentrating especially on regimes, such as that in Iran, that institutionalize it. Millett returned to autobiography in A. D.: A Memoir (1995), a meditation on death that begins with her learning of the death of her Aunt Dorothy (A. D.), whom she much admired as a child. Even though the two had been out of touch, the death moved Millett to review her own life. Stylistically, the book was called a “flood-of-consciousness” and a mixture of candor and self-indulgence, by The New York Times critic Elizabeth Gleick.

Another memoir, Mother Millett (2001), addresses the injustice of involuntary confinement and the rights of the elderly and is a text for the movement against psychiatry in which Millett participates. Mother Millett follows the last years in the life of her mother. Helen Millett was a feminist as well, having developed interests outside marriage. She was a business leader, publicly opposed the Vietnam War, and publicly supported civil rights and lesbian and gay rights. Finding her mother frail, Millett agreed to place her in a nursing home. The care there, which included tranquilizing the elderly residents to make them tractable, horrified Millett, because it turned her mother into a nonperson, almost unrecognizable. Understanding intimately what her mother was enduring, she removed her mother from the nursing home.

Millett continued to produce and exhibit her artwork. In 1997, the Center for Art and Visual Culture in Baltimore exhibited her retrospective Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First Thirty-eight Years, which included a catalog published the same year. In 1999, New York’s NoHo Gallery hosted her Elegy for a Murdered Lady, a series of drawings about her Aunt Margaret, who died in a nursing facility; as she was able to do with her own mother, Millett attempted to have her aunt removed from the nursing home, but without luck.

Millett directed the Women’s Art Colony Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, which she bought as a farm in 1971 and then developed into an artists’ community. The art colony offered summer residencies to writers, visual artists, and musicians from all over the world. For twenty years she also maintained a Christmas tree farm.

In 2012, the same year that the art colony was registered as a nonprofit organization and renamed the Millett Center for the Arts, Millett received the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award as well as the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award. The following year, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She died on September 6, 2017, while on an annual trip to Paris, France, at the age of eighty-two. The cause was reportedly cardiac arrest.

Significance

Millett will be remembered primarily as the author of Sexual Politics, an impressively informed, controlled analysis of the patriarchal order by a young radical sensibility that challenged the confinements of cultural stereotypes and institutions. With its phenomenal success, Sexual Politics provided the women’s movement with a theoretical background for its struggles against male domination. It also pioneered academic feminist literary criticism, which has since influenced heavily the teaching and research on literature in many American colleges and universities. Millett’s coming out first as bisexual and later as lesbian led her to become an articulate and influential spokesperson in the struggle for lesbian and gay rights. Combining feminist ideals with careful and controlled analyses of the limitations and abuses of patriarchal social control, she emerged as a champion of human rights as well.

Bibliography

Donovan, Josephine, editor. Feminist Literary Criticism. 2nd ed., U of Kentucky P, 1989. A series of essays examining the impact of feminist literary criticism on the academy. The first essay places Sexual Politics in the context of other works that analyze male images of women.

Hannam, June. Feminism. Pearson/Longman, 2006. Part of the Short Histories of Big Ideas series, this book outlines the history of the women’s movement, paying close attention to how women cooperate nationally and internationally to effect social change. Excellent background for understanding Millett’s contributions. Includes a bibliography.

Millett, Kate. Flying. Simon & Schuster, 1974. After the phenomenal success of Sexual Politics, Millett found herself both canonized and reviled as the near-mythical leader of the women’s movement. This book recounts the relationship between a writer’s life and her art, and her attempts to salvage a believable, productive woman out of the uproar surrounding the publication of her first book.

Millett, Kate. The Loony-Bin Trip. Simon & Schuster, 1990. An autobiographical account of Millett’s long-term struggle with bipolar disorder, her treatment with the drug lithium, and her decision in 1980 to stop taking the drug. Her account is an indictment of psychiatric treatment as a form of social control.

Millett, Kate. Mother Millett. Verso, 2001. Millett relates how she spirited her ailing mother from a nursing home and attempted to help her regain her health; she reflects on the moral and personal lessons that the experience taught her.

Millett, Kate. Sita. Simon & Schuster, 1977. Millett’s autobiographical account of her first diagnosis as a manic-depressive, her divorce from her husband, and the road to recovery she journeyed when she met and fell in love with Sita, a woman ten years older than Millett, artistic, witty, seductive, and strong. The memoir recounts the successes and despairs of a deeply felt lesbian relationship.

Sehgal, Parul, and Neil Genzlinger. "Kate Millett, Ground-Breaking Feminist Writer, Is Dead at 82." The New York Times, 6 Sept. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/obituaries/kate-millett-influential-feminist-writer-is-dead-at-82.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.