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. 
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/kate-millett-dead-feminist-author-sexual-politics-dies-82-age-dies-died-a7934576.html 

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...

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