Kate Millett dead: Feminist author of Sexual Politics dies aged 82
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 at 82. Millett died of
a heart attack while
on a visit to Paris on
Wednesday, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak for the family.
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." Millett's
book was among the most talked-about works of its time and remains a founding
text for cultural and gender studies programmes. It chronicled
millennia of legal, political and cultural exclusion and diminishment of
women.
Kate Millett, pioneering second-wave feminist, dies aged 82
Kate Millett, the
wayward artist, thinker and activist whose 1970 book Sexual Politics became a
keystone of second-wave feminism, has died at the age of 82. Perhaps aptly for
someone who wrote widely and fervently of her pursuit of love, she succumbed to
a heart attack during an annual holiday in Paris to celebrate her birthday with
her wife and longtime collaborator, the photojournalist Sophie Keir. “Let’s
always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year – let
it always be an affair,” Millett wrote in Sita, her 1976 account of an earlier
lesbian relationship, which, like subsequent autobiographical works, became an
exploration of forms of love.
Lena Dunham was among
those who paid immediate tribute to her cultural importance, and its continuing
impact on a new generation of readers and writers: She was working as a
sculptor when Sexual
Politics, based on her doctorate at Columbia, was published. A New York
Times pen portrait written at the time reported that it had sold 10,000 copies
in a fortnight, making her “something of a high priestess of the current
feminist wave, a movement long on gimmickry but short on philosophy until Miss
Millett appeared on the scene”. Andrea Dworkin later wrote: “I cannot think of
anyone who accomplished what Kate Millett did, with this one book. It remains
the alpha and omega of the women’s movement.”
“In the matter of
conformity,” Millett wrote in the book, “patriarchy is a governing ideology
without peer; it is probable that no other system has ever exercised such a
complete control over its subjects.”
Before Sexual
Politics, she had published a scathing indictment of women’s colleges, Token
Learning, which documented the ways women were being trained for gentility and
“service” rather than achievement and leadership, said Showalter. “Her visit to
Douglass, the women’s college of Rutgers University where I taught, in April
1970, persuaded the faculty to rethink its mission and methods and began a new
era of feminist education devoted to the encouragement of excellence in women.”
Her forthright style
and strong opinions won her as many adversaries as friends, among
them Norman Mailer, whom she eviscerated in Sexual Politics as one of three
“counterrevolutionary sexual politicians”, along with DH Lawrence and Henry
Miller, for their representations of sex. Mailer lashed back in The Prisoner of
Sex, published a year later – “not one of his best”, quipped Millett.
In 1974, she published
Flying, the first of her books rooted in her own experience, which dealt with
the fallout of literary celebrity for a woman who was always uncomfortable in
the spotlight. The
Loony-Bin Trip (1990) dealt with a painful period when she was
hospitalised by her family after being diagnosed with manic depression, and
Mother Millett, in 2001, explored the love between mothers and children when
decrepitude has overturned the old power relationship.
In 1979, she and Keir
travelled to speak at Iran’s first celebration of International Women’s Day.
They were arrested and evicted from the country, but went on to found a support
group for women fleeing Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, and to record the
experience in a 1981 book, Going to Iran...
