Kate Millett

Not to be confused with Catherine Millet.

Kate Millett
Millett in 1970
Born	September 14, 1934 (1934-09-14) St. Paul, Minnesota
Nationality	United States

Kate Millett (born Katherine Murray Millett; September 14, 1934 in St. Paul, Minnesota) is an American feminist writer and activist. A seminal influence on second-wave feminism, Millett is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics.

Career

Millett received her B.A. at the University of Minnesota in 1956, where she was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She later obtained a first-class degree, with honors, from St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1958. She was the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors by St. Hilda's.

Millett moved to Japan in 1961, where she taught English and pursued a career as a sculptor. Two years later, Millett returned to the United States with fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura whom she married in 1965. The two divorced in 1985. She was active in feminist politics in late 1960s and the 1970s. In 1966, she became a committee member of National Organization for Women.

Sexual Politics originated as her Ph.D. dissertation, which was awarded by Columbia University in 1970. Here Millett offers a comprehensive critique of patriarchy in Western society and literature. In particular, Millett critiques the sexism and heterosexism of the modern novelists D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, contrasting their perspectives with the dissenting viewpoint of the homosexual author Jean Genet.

In 1971, Millett started buying and restoring fields and buildings near Poughkeepsie, New York. The project eventually became the Women's Art Colony/Tree Farm, a community of female lesbian artists and writers that is supported by the sale of Millett's silk-screen prints and by selling Christmas trees that have been hand-sheared by the artists in residence.

Millett's 1971 film Three Lives is a 16mm documentary made by an all-woman crew, including co-director Susan Kleckner, cameraperson Lenore Bode, and editor Robin Mide, under the name Women's Liberation Cinema. The 70-minute film focuses on reminiscences of three women recounting the stories of their lives. The subjects are Mallory Millett-Jones (the director's sister), Lillian Shreve, a chemist, and Robin Mide, an artist.

Her book Flying (1974) tells of her marriage with Yoshimura and her love affairs with women. Sita (1977) is a meditation on Millett's doomed love affair with a female college administrator who was ten years her senior. In 1979, Millett went to Iran to work for women's rights, was soon deported, and wrote about the experience in Going to Iran. In The Loony-Bin Trip (1990), she describes her experience of being incarcerated in psychiatric facilities, her experience of being diagnosed as "bipolar", and her decision to discontinue lithium therapy. She won her own sanity trial in St. Paul. On a dare with her lawyer, together they changed the State of Minnesota's commitment law.

Millett was a contributor to On The Issues Magazine and was interviewed at length for an article in the magazine by Merle Hoffman.

Millett is active in the anti-psychiatry movement. As a representative of MindFreedom International, she spoke out against psychiatric torture at the United Nations during the negotiations of the text of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2005).

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Millett was involved in a dispute with the New York City authorities who wanted to evict her from her home at 295 Bowery as part of a massive redevelopment plan. Millett and others held out, but ultimately lost their battle. Their building was demolished, and the residents were re-located.

Controversy

The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice, Millett's semi-fictional book about the 1965 torture and murder of American teenager Sylvia Likens by Gertrude Baniszewski, drew controversy for her defense of the crime. Millett argued for a feminist interpretation of the crime:

[The murder of Sylvia Likens] is the story of the suppression of women. Gertrude seems to have wanted to administer some terrible truthful justice to this girl: that this was what it was to be a woman.

More generally, humanities scholar Camille Paglia has described Millet's scholarship as deeply flawed, declaring that "American feminism’s nose dive began" when Millet achieved prominence.

Bibliography

• Sexual Politics (1970)
• The Prostitution Papers (1973)
• Flying (1974)
• Sita (1977)
• The Basement (1979)
• Going to Iran (1979)
• The Loony-Bin Trip (1990)
• Believe me, you don't want a picture of that! (1991)
• The Politics of Cruelty (1994)
• A.D.: A Memoir (1995)
• Mother Millett (2001)

Films

• Des fleurs pour Simone de Beauvoir (2007)
• The Real Yoko Ono (2001) (TV)
• "Bookmark" .... (1 episode, 1989)
  • Daughters of de Beauvoir (TV episode, 1989)
• Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1981)
• Three Lives (1971, Producer)
• Playboy: The Story of X (1998) (Archive Footage)

Sources

• Lorna Sage The Cambridge Guide to Women's Literature in English, 1999, Cambridge

External links

• KateMillett.com - Official website for Kate Millett, including information on the Women's Art Colony Farm.
• "The Liberation of Kate Millett", Time Magazine, August 30, 1970.
• Crawford, Leslie. "Kate Millett, The Ambivalent Feminist", Salon, June 5, 1999.
• Freely, Maureen. "Return of the troublemaker", The Guardian, June 19, 2001.
• Kate Millett, GLBTQ Encyclopedia entry
• Kate Millett, fembio.org
• Photos [2], [3]
• imdb
• Millett, Kate. "Out of the Loop", On The Issues Magazine, Summer 1998.