Kate Millett

Kate Millett: The Woman Who Put Literature on Trial

A doctoral dissertation is not supposed to sell 80,000 copies in a year, land its author on the cover of Time magazine, or provoke a book-length rebuttal from Norman Mailer. Kate Millett's did all three. *Sexual Politics*, published in 1970, took the tools of literary close reading and turned them on D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Mailer himself, arguing that their celebrated depictions of sexual liberation were, underneath, expressions of contempt for women — and in doing so, gave the emerging women's movement something it had lacked: a systematic theory.

Saint Paul to Oxford

Katherine Murray Millett was born September 14, 1934, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an engineer father who was abusive, alcoholic, and abandoned the family when Kate was fourteen, leaving her mother to raise three daughters in what biographers describe as genteel poverty. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota in 1956, and a wealthy aunt funded her subsequent studies at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where in 1958 she became the first American woman awarded a first-class honors degree in English literature from that institution — an early sign of an intellect that would later be trained directly on the literary canon itself.

A Detour Through Art

Millett's path to *Sexual Politics* was not direct. She briefly taught at the University of North Carolina, then spent two years as a New York kindergarten teacher while studying sculpture, before moving to Japan from 1961 to 1963, where she had her first solo gallery show and met sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, whom she later married in 1965, by her own account primarily to prevent his deportation, in a relationship she and biographers described as one of enduring friendship rather than conventional marriage. Returning to New York, she taught English at Barnard College, where in December 1968 she was dismissed after circulating "Token Learning," a pointed critique of the college's approach to educating women — a firing that pushed her toward the doctoral work at Columbia that would become her most famous book.

Sexual Politics

Millett completed her Columbia dissertation in 1969 and received her doctorate with distinction the following year; Doubleday published it as *Sexual Politics* in 1970. Its method was straightforward but had rarely been applied so systematically before: read celebrated male authors' treatment of sex and women as political texts, not just aesthetic ones. She found in Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer patterns of domination dressed up as sexual candor, and set them against Jean Genet as a dissenting counter-example. Journalist Judith Shulevitz later credited Millett with essentially inventing feminist literary criticism as a discipline, and Time magazine called the book, in 1970, the first coherent theory the feminist movement had produced. The book sold 80,000 copies in its first year through seven printings, and its 1970 argument — that sex-based oppression was a political structure, not a series of private grievances, and that the traditional family was the institution that reproduced it — became, in the phrase of the time, the movement's manifesto.

Fame, Backlash, and a Forced Coming Out

The book's success made Millett briefly the most visible face of American feminism, featured on Time's cover with a portrait by Alice Neel. It also drew serious critical fire: critic Irving Howe dismissed her as "brilliant in an unserious way," and Norman Mailer responded with an entire book, *The Prisoner of Sex*, accusing her of quoting selectively to build her case. Later critics, including Camille Paglia, argued more broadly that Millett's method reduced literature to raw political content and set serious literary criticism back for years. In late 1970, after publicly acknowledging she was a lesbian when asked directly at a Columbia University appearance, Millett found herself at the center of a separate controversy when Time suggested her bisexuality would undermine her standing as a feminist leader — prompting thirty lesbian and feminist leaders to hold a press conference declaring solidarity with her.

A Restless, Wide-Ranging Career

Millett never settled into a single genre after her defining book. She wrote *The Prostitution Papers* (1971) advocating decriminalization directed by sex workers themselves; *Flying* (1974) and *Sita* (1977), stream-of-consciousness memoirs exploring her own sexuality and relationships; *The Basement* (1979), a harrowing feminist analysis of a real 1965 torture-murder case; and *Going to Iran* (1982), documenting her firsthand witness of Iranian women protesting Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in 1979, a trip that ended in her detention and deportation. She continued working as a sculptor throughout, exhibiting in Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles, and appeared in and made documentary films, including her own *Three Lives* (1971).

Institutionalization and Anti-Psychiatry Activism

Beginning in 1973, Millett experienced serious mental health crises that led to multiple involuntary psychiatric commitments, including one instigated by her own sister and another during a 1980 detention at Dublin's airport that she later described as "the worst bin of all." She was diagnosed with what is now called bipolar disorder, medicated with lithium for years, and eventually stopped taking it in 1986 by her own choice. She turned the experience directly into activism and into her 1990 book *The Loony-Bin Trip*, working to change Minnesota's involuntary-commitment law and later speaking, as a representative of MindFreedom International, against forced psychiatric treatment at United Nations negotiations in 2005.

Death and Recognition

Millett died of cardiac arrest in Paris on September 6, 2017, eight days before her 83rd birthday, with her longtime partner Sophie Keir at her side. She had been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2013 and had received the Lambda Pioneer Award for Literature and Yoko Ono's Courage Award for the Arts, among other honors, in her final years.

Why Kate Is Called a Genius

The case for Millett's genius rests on a genuinely original intellectual move: treating literary sex scenes and celebrated authors' reputations as political evidence rather than aesthetic achievements, and doing so with enough rigor and force to reorganize how an entire generation understood the connection between private life and political power. Biographer Gayle Graham Yates credited her with having "articulated a theory of patriarchy" in terms that demanded structural change, not just individual attitude adjustment — a genuinely systematic contribution, built out of close textual analysis, that Time and much of the press at the time treated as intellectually novel rather than merely polemical. The honest counter-case, made forcefully by contemporaries and later critics alike, is that her scholarship was selective and sometimes unfair to the writers she indicted, that her wholesale rejection of the family as an institution alienated many of the ordinary women feminism needed to reach, and that her influence on literary criticism was, in Camille Paglia's blunt assessment, as much a setback for the discipline as an advance. What is not disputed is the scale of the reaction: few dissertations provoke a rebuttal book from a Pulitzer Prize winner, and Millett's did.

Legacy

*Sexual Politics* remains a foundational text of second-wave feminism and of feminist literary criticism as a field, still assigned and still argued over more than half a century later. Millett's broader life — spent moving restlessly between scholarship, sculpture, memoir, and activism against institutions from patriarchy to psychiatry — resists easy summary, but the through-line is consistent: an insistence, first proven in a doctoral dissertation, that the personal, the sexual, and the literary were never separate from power.

Achievements

• Notable work: Sexual Politics
• Notable work: The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment
• Movement: second-wave feminism