Kate Millett
American feminist whose trailblazing book Sexual Politics pummelled the western patriarchy
KATE MILLETT, who has died aged 82, was a leading American feminist theorist and advocate of gay rights, best known for her influential book Sexual Politics, in which she argued that sex was about power and “outed” an array of admired writers as male chauvinists; in Britain, however, she was probably best known for an appearance in 1991 on the arty discussion show After Dark, when she was drunkenly propositioned by Oliver Reed.
The programme, broadcast live on Channel 4 television between 1987 and 1997, was famous for giving its guests free rein to ruminate or ramble, fuelled by unlimited quantities of alcohol. So it was possibly not wise to invite the famously hell-raising actor to participate in a discussion about male violence alongside a woman famous for her lesbianism and her radical politics.
Drinking wine from a half-pint glass and periodically falling off his chair, Reed kicked off proceedings by arguing that “a woman’s role in society depends on whether she wants to get shafted”. Things went downhill from there until the programme makers pulled the discussion from the air and substituted a grainy 1950s documentary about the coal industry. Twenty minutes later, however, Reed was back on air roaring “Where’s the bull dyke?” before making a drunken lunge at Kate Millett with the demand: “Give us a kiss, big tits.”
When the conversation eventually got around to a woman who had tried to castrate her partner with a carving knife Reed delivered his pièce de résistance: “I’d say to the woman I’ll put my plonker on the table if you don’t give me my mushy peas.”
To her credit Kate Millett responded with good humour, and allegedly later asked for a tape of the show to entertain her friends.
One of three daughters, Katherine Murray Millett was born on September 14 1934 in St Paul, Minnesota. Her mother, Helen, divorced her husband when Kate was 13 and embarked on a career selling life insurance, at a time when both divorce and working women were frowned upon.
Kate took a degree in English at the University of Minnesota, and when she was 22 her glamorous Aunt Dorothy (the subject of her 1995 book AD, a Memoir) offered to pay for an Oxford education – on condition that Kate give up her lesbian lover. Kate agreed, but secretly arranged to live with her girlfriend in Oxford. She returned to the US in triumph as the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate Oxford degree with first-class honours, but her aunt discovered the deception and never forgave her.
After teaching briefly at the University of North Carolina, Kate pursued a career as an artist and sculptor in Japan and then New York, where she took a job at Barnard College teaching English Literature. Though she later “came out” as a lesbian, in 1965 she married the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura.
In 1970 she took a PHD from Columbia University with a dissertation subsequently published as
Sexual Politics. Its core thesis was that western patriarchy is a socially conditioned belief system masquerading as human nature. She illustrated her theme with examples from works by writers such as DH Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, who, at the time, were being hailed as the sages of sexual liberation. Kate Millett’s analysis all but destroyed their authority. The feminist Susan Brownmiller credited the book with inventing feminist literary criticism.
Sexual Politics catapulted Kate Millett to the cover of Time magazine as the new face of feminism, and she reinforced her status by leading a feminist posse in an invasion of the offices of Cosmopolitan magazine, forcing its editor Helen Gurley Brown back against a radiator and attacking her celebration of “man-hunting”. But her fame brought Kate Millett under attack from many sides, as a manhating feminist, a media sell-out, a lesbian “lavender menace,” or (since she was still married) a bisexual who was not lesbian enough.
She had not publicly come out, but when she decided to do so (in Flying (1974) and Sita (1977)) her mother was appalled. She described a telephone conversation during which her mother asked after her writing: “‘Katie, you are not writing about that Lesbianism, are you?’ She is a terrier after a bone now … ‘Well Mother, that has to be in it because it’s part of my experience.’ Now there is just her nervous wail … She escalates to moaning. I am a freak.”
In The Loony-bin Trip (1990), published when she was 55, Kate Millett described how in 1973 her family had her forcibly committed twice to a mental hospital, first in California, and a few weeks later in Minnesota. She maintained there was nothing wrong with her; family members were quoted as saying that she had lost touch with reality and often could not recognise her family and friends.
She managed to extricate herself with the help of a pro bono lawyer, but her life was messy. Her husband was leaving her and, plunged into a severe depression, she decided to obey doctor’s orders and begin a course of lithium. She took the drug for 13 years (with one interruption), during which she marched with the women of the Iranian revolution, got deported (the subject of Going to Iran (1981)) and bought a Christmas tree farm near Poughkeepsie, which she struggled to turn into an artists’ colony for women. The interruption occurred in 1980 when she stopped taking lithium and (by her account) her partner (later wife) Sophie Keir started looking at her to see if she was going “crazy”, provoking her to lose her temper.
Within weeks her family had called in another psychiatrist, but she managed to give the men in white coats the slip and decamped to Ireland to support Irish hunger strikers in British prisons. Picked up by the police at Shannon airport, she was detained and taken to a mental hospital outside Dublin where (she claimed) she was drugged and kept incommunicado for days before being released.
On her return to America Kate Millett went back on lithium for six more years before stopping the treatment in secret; apparently no one noticed. The anti-psychiatry movement was one of many causes she took up as an activist.
During less publicised years, Kate Millett painted and sculpted, and had her work shown in solo and group exhibitions. She re-emerged briefly with The Politics of Cruelty (1994), an investigation of the use of torture, but in 1998 she resurfaced in a furious article for an American magazine (reprinted in a shortened version in the Guardian under the headline, “Read this and weep”), in which she complained that, at 63, she was broke, out of print in her own country and unable to find a job: “I cannot get employment. I cannot earn money. Except by selling Christmas trees, one by one, in the cold in Poughkeepsie. What poverty ahead, what mortification, what distant bag-lady horrors, when my savings are gone?”
In response she got a call “out of the blue” offering to bring out several of her works in new editions, and she went on to publish Mother Millett (2001), partly a memoir of her mother’s declining years but also a political work, an extension of The Loony-bin Trip, reinforcing her arguments against forced institutionalisation – this time focusing on the elderly.
Between 2011 and 2013, she won the Lambda Pioneer Award for Literature, received Yoko Ono’s Courage Award for the Arts, and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
Her wife Sophie Keir survives her.
Kate Millett, born September 14 1934, died September 6 2017