Writer, activist known for her “Sexual Politics”
PARIS» Kate Millett, the activist, artist and educator whose best-selling work, “Sexual Politics,” was a landmark of cultural criticism and a manifesto for the modern feminist movement, has died at 82.
Millett’s book was among the most talked-about works of its time and remains a founding text for cultural and gender studies programs.
Her impact reached across generations and across borders — and condolences filled social networks in multiple languages Thursday.
Millett died of a heart attack Wednesday while on a visit to Paris, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak. The publishing house that carried her books in French also confirmed her death.
“Sexual Politics” was published in 1970 in the midst of feminism’s socalled “second wave,” when Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Millett and others built upon the achievements of the suffragettes from a half century earlier. Together they challenged assumptions about women in virtually every aspect of society.
Among Millett’s 21stcentury 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.”
“Sexual Politics” chronicled centuries of legal, political and cultural exclusion and diminishment of women, from the “penis envy” theory of Sigmund Freud to the portrayals of women as disrupters of paradise in the Bible and Greek mythology. She labeled traditional marriage an artifact of patriarchy and concluded with 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.
The daughter of Irish Catholics, Millett was born in 1934 in St. Paul, Minn., and was long haunted by her father, an alcoholic who beat his children and left his family when Millett was 14. She attended parochial schools as a child and studied English literature at the University of Minnesota and St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.
Millett lived briefly in Japan, where she met her future husband and fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura. They divorced in 1985.