Obituary: Kate Millett

Famed second-wave feminist and writer Kate Millett, 82, died today. She wrote many books, some based on her struggles with mental illness, but her best known work remains Sexual Politics, published in 1970. It had in part been her dissertation, but I think the dissertation was the major portion of the book, where she gave a feminist analysis of the works of writers Norman Mailer, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet. That part of the book is mostly of interest to people who read literary criticism. The best part of her book was the first part, where she gave her take on feminism and society.

It has been years since I read it. She made the cover of Time magazine. She also was a meal ticket for Norman Mailer, a man who always found a way to make a buck. He wrote his book The Prisoner of Sex as a response to Millett and other feminist critics. He could dish out the sexism, but he sure as hell couldn't take criticism.

Millett was married for a number of years to a Japanese sculptor, but she later divorced him and found she preferred women. She was a private person by nature, and all of the publicity surrounding Sexual Politics contributed to some mental problems later on. I could see that. One minute she was a doctoral student, and then almost overnight she was a media sensation.

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Millett was born in Minnesota in 1934. Her father, an alcoholic, abandoned her family when she was 14, leaving her mother and two sisters in poverty. A wealthy aunt paid for her education, leading her to study comparative literature at Columbia University and to teach at Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of California, Berkeley.

The writer, whose work many consider a milestone in the fight for legal abortion, gender equality in the workplace, and sexual freedom, sought not to be a spokesperson for the feminist movement. “Better to operate on an even keel like Friedan and Gloria [Steinem] and the others,” she later reflected. “All far better politicians. But I am not a politician. Not ‘Kate Millett of Women’s Lib’ either.”

Millett is featured in the 2014 film She's Beautiful When She's Angry as a feminist leader. After Sexual Politics, Millett wrote autobiographical memoirs on sexuality and mental health, including Mother Millett and The Loony Bin Trip.

Millett died of cardiac arrest:

Ms. Millett was in her mid-30s and a generally unknown sculptor when her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, “Sexual Politics,” was published by Doubleday and Co. Her core premise was that the relationship between the sexes is political, with the definition of politics including, as she once said, “arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.”

“However muted its appearance may be,” Ms. Millett wrote, “sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.”

The book became a central work of what is often called second-wave feminism, but being a star of the movement did not come naturally to Ms. Millett.