Formidable influence in gender studies
PARIS: Kate Millett, a contemporary of Germaine Greer and whose bestselling Sexual
Politics was a landmark manifesto for the modern feminist movement, has died. She was 82.
Millett died of a heart attack during a visit to Paris.
Sexual Politics was published in 1970, during feminism’s socalled second wave, when Australia’s Greer, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Millett and others challenged society’s assumptions about women.
Millett’s book was among the most talkedabout works of its time and remains a founding text for cultural and gender studies.
‘‘It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination — and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity,’’ she wrote.
While countless women were radicalised by her book, Millett had bittersweet feelings about
Sexual Politics.
She was overwhelmed by her sudden transformation from graduate student to feminist celebrity whose image appeared on the cover of Time magazine, dubbed ‘‘the Mao Tsetung of Women’s Liberation’’.
Millett’s books after Sexual
Politics were far more personal and selfconsciously literary.
Flying was a memoir about her sexuality, while The Loony Bin
Trip detailed her struggles with bipolar disorder and time in hospital.
The daughter of Irish Catholics, Millett was born in Minnesota and was haunted by her father, an alcoholic who beat his children and left his family when Millett was 14.
She studied English literature at the University of Minnesota and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, from which she graduated with honours.
Less known to younger feminists than Steinem or Friedan, she was honoured several times late in life.
In 2012, she was given the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation and the same year was presented with a Courage Award for the Arts prize by her longtime friend Yoko Ono. Millett was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2013. — AP