Kate Millett

Kate Millett Biography

Kate Millett was born on the 14th of September 1934 in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was an American feminist, artist, author, and one of the earliest and most influential figures in the women’s liberation movement in the U.S. and the world.

Fig. 1 Kate Millett

She gained a bachelor’s degree with honours from the University of Minnesota at 22. She was the first woman to earn a first-class honours master’s degree from the University of Oxford. She moved back to Greensboro, NC, where she taught English at the University of North Carolina. Then, she moved to New York City to focus on her career as an artist – something she had always wanted to pursue. To support herself while pursuing this career, she taught kindergarten in Harlem.

In 1961, she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University whilst studying sculpture at a nearby college. In 1965, she moved back to New York City to teach English and Philosophy at Barnard College and married Fumio Yoshimura, a Japanese sculptor. They divorced in 1985. Whilst she was teaching at Barnard College, she studied towards a doctorate at Columbia University and in 1970, she gained a PhD with distinction. In 1970, she also published her most famous book, Sexual Politics¹ and came out as lesbian and shortly after as bisexual.

In 1978, with her long-term partner Sophie Keir, she founded the Women’s Art Colony with the proceeds from sales of Sexual Politics. The Women’s Art Colony funded itself by being a Christmas tree farm and also offered a safe space for women to discuss feminist issues. In 2012, the Women’s Art Colony became a not-for-profit organisation and was renamed the Millett’s Centre for the Arts.

Millet died in 2017 in Paris, France, while on holiday with Keir.

Kate Millett Theory

Kate Millet formulated the theory that women’s subjugation to men was socially, rather than biologically, constructed. It challenged the idea that the inequality between women and men was natural. She was one of the first writers to discuss women’s subjugation to patriarchy as institutionalised in every aspect of life, including personal roles within the family. This theory is the basis of radical feminism and can be summarised as “the personal is political”. Millett’s definition differed from perspectives that focused on the subjugation dynamics being played out only outside the home, in the social, political and economic realms.

Fig. 2 Symbol of Feminism, combines the astronomical symbol for Venus and the clenched fist symbol of the 1960s "power" movements

Kate Millett Radical Feminism

Let’s look at some of the books Kate Millet wrote that exemplify her stance as a radical feminist.

Millett’s book, The Basement² was a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder. The abuse happened at the hands of a small group of teenagers led by an older woman. This woman was supposed to be protecting the young woman, but instead allowed for the horror to occur to teach the young woman the “truth” about womanhood. With this account, Millet intended to illustrate how women had internalised and accepted oppression.

During a 1979 trip to Iran where she and Sophie Keir participated in a Women’s day march, they witnessed first-hand the political oppression of women after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. While many Iranian women who participated in the march were beaten, Millet and Keir were detained and deported to Paris. This experience reinforced in Millett the necessity for international sisterhood, a key concept in second-wave feminism. She also wrote a book - Going to Iran ³- giving an account of what she saw and sharing her reflections on the experience.

Millett was involved in campaigns against torture and prison reform. In The Politics of Cruelty⁴, published in 1994, she analysed the worldwide use of state-sanctioned torture as a conscious policy. Here, Millett deepens her analysis of the “personal is political” from the perspective of the power that the state claims over prisoners when they use torture.

Kate Millett Sexual Politics

Millet's first and most famous book, Sexual Politics, started her exploration of the power dynamics in the relationship between men and women, which are ultimately rooted in patriarchy and which she, therefore, defines as political.

Sexual Politics was based on the study of these dynamics through an analysis of works of art and literature.

Cover of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics

This book helped to verbalise the struggle and to define the goals of the second-wave feminist movement.

Because of the overnight success of her book, she found herself a reluctant spokesperson for the feminist movement. This role was one of the causes of her mental health troubles, which she explored in other major publications.

Kate Millett Famous Work

Millett's two main autobiographical books are Flying⁵ and Sita⁶. Flying is an honest exploration of her life following the success of Sexual Politics and the emotions and struggles of going from being a sculptor no one knew to a famous feminist writer. She also focused on the experience of making her sexuality public at a time when there were still many taboos around sexuality and gender expression.

Flying was a commercial success and contributed toward raising awareness for feminist work and views around sexuality.

In Sita, Millett offers a candid tribute to her relationship with Sita, a woman who is older than her and has older children from three previous marriages. Here she explores being a lesbian and being in a lesbian relationship, her mental health and political struggles.

Her mental health issues led to several suicide attempts and hospitalisation against her will. Millett opened up about these experiences in her book, The Loony Bin Trip⁷. Here she criticises the psychiatric system for manufacturing “madness” through medicalisation and detention and describes her struggle to shake off the stigma of mental illness. Crucially, with the support of her lawyer, Millett changed the law on being involuntarily committed in the State of Minnesota⁸. She made it so that a trial was necessary before removing liberties could happen.

Her final work, published in 2001, titled Mother Millet, looked at the infantilisation of the ill and the ageing as seen through her mother's struggles in a nursing home. This book also highlighted the issues that came with motherhood and the pressure women experienced to conform to the role of housewife.

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