Kate Millett authored ‘Sexual Politics’
Book became a manifesto for women’s movement
PARIS - Kate Millett, the activist, artist and educator whose best-selling “Sexual Politics” was a landmark of cultural criticism and a manifesto for the modern feminist movement, has died. She was 82.
Millett died of a heart attack Wednesday while on a visit to Paris, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. The publishing house that carried her books in French also confirmed the death but provided no details.
“Sexual Politics” was published in 1970, in the midst of feminism’s so-called “second wave,” when Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Millett and others built upon the achievements of the suffragettes from a half-century earlier and challenged assumptions about women in virtually every aspect of society. Millett’s book was among the most talkedabout works of its time and remains a founding text for cultural and gender studies programs.
Among Millett’s fans was TV star and writer Lena Dunham, who tweeted: “So sad to hear about Kate Millett’s passing. She pioneered feminist thought, de-stigmatized mental illness, wore massive fashion glasses.”
Steinem posted a tribute on Facebook: “As Andrea Dworkin said, ‘The world was asleep, but Kate Millett woke it up.’ Sexual Politics — and all Kate’s work — will keep us Woke.”
Millett chronicled millennia of legal, political and cultural exclusion and diminishment, whether the “penis envy” theory of Sigmund Freud or the portrayals of women as disrupters of paradise in the Bible and in mythology. She labeled traditional marriage an artifact of patriarchy and had chapters condemning the misogyny of authors Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, but also expressing faith in the redemptive power of women’s liberation.
“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 radicalized by her book, Millett would have bittersweet feelings about “Sexual Politics,” which later fell out of print for years. She was unhappy with its “mandarin mid-Atlantic” prose and overwhelmed by her sudden transformation from graduate student and artist to a feminist celebrity whose image appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Amused at first by her fame, she was worn down by a “ruin of interviews, articles, attacks.”
“Soon it grew tedious, an indignity,” she wrote in the memoir “Flying,” published in 1974.
She was dubbed by Time “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation,” and rebutted by Mailer in his book “The Prisoner of Sex,” mocking her as “the Battling Annie of some new prudery.”
Millett’s books after “Sexual Politics” were far more personal and self-consciously literary, whether “Flying” or “Sita,” a memoir about her sexuality in which she wrote of a lesbian lover who committed suicide; or “The Loony Bin Trip,” an account of her struggles with manic depression and time spent in psychiatric wards.