Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values
When Kate Millett died, half-forgotten, on September 6 at the age of
eighty-two, obituary writers struggled to take the full measure of this
pioneering feminist writer and activist. Maybe Second Wave feminism now
seems so far away that we’re hazy about what once made it so thrilling
and threatening. Let me state it plainly: Millett invented feminist
literary criticism. Before her, it did not exist. Her urgent, elegant
1970 masterwork,
Sexual Politics, with its wry takedowns of the casual misogyny and rape scenes that had made the reputations of the sexual revolutionaries
du jour—Norman
Mailer, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence—introduced a new and remarkably
durable idea: you could interpret literature in light of its gender
dynamics. You could go to novels and poems for an education in sex as
power. You may not agree that literature is the proper medium for
consciousness-raising, but you can’t deny that Millett made reading a
life-changing, even world-changing, act. ...
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