Kate Millett

Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values

Judith Shulevitz,

NYRB, NYRDaily, September 29, 2017

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. ...

Kate Milletts 80th Birthday

Katherine Murray Millett, commonly known as Kate Millett (born September 14, 1934), is an American feminist writer, artist and activist. A seminal influence on second-wave feminism, Millett is perhaps best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics, which was her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, prior to that she attended Oxford University and was the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors by St. Hilda's. She has been an educator, artist, activist and a writer. Her books were motivated by her activism for woman's rights and mental health reform and several were autobiographical memoirs.

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