In 1968, she was fired from her job as an English lecturer at Barnard College, a decision that stemmed at least in part from her support of student protests against the Vietnam War.
Millett taught at several schools, including the University of North Carolina and New York University. Through her own Women’s Liberation Cinema production company, she directed the acclaimed feminist documentary “Three Lives.” She also founded the Women’s Art Colony Farm in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She joined the National Organization for Women and began attracting a following for her sculpture, which appeared in Life magazine and has been exhibited worldwide. They moved to Manhattan in 1963, and Millett embraced the political and artistic passions of the city. She attended parochial schools as a child and studied English literature at the University of Minnesota and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, from which she graduated with honors.įor a couple of years, Millett lived in Japan, where she met her husband and fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura (they divorced in 1985). Paul, Minn., and was long haunted by her father, an alcoholic who beat his children and left his family when Millett was 14. The daughter of Irish Catholics, Millett was born in St.
“The swarms of fears, the blocks to confidence, the crises of decision and choice.” “There is no denying the misery and stress of life,” she wrote. Millett’s books after “Sexual Politics” were far more personal and self-consciously literary, whether “Flying” or “Sita,” a memoir about her sexuality in which she wrote of a female lover who committed suicide or “The Loony Bin Trip,” an account of her struggles with manic depression and time spent in psychiatric wards. The line goes, inflexible as a fascist edict, that bisexuality is a cop-out. That word in public, the word I waited half a lifetime to hear. “Everything pauses, faces look up in terrible silence. During an appearance by Millett at Columbia, an activist stood up and yelled, “Are you a lesbian? Say it. She was dubbed by Time “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation,” and rebutted by Mailer in his book “The Prisoner of Sex,” in which he mocked her as “the Battling Annie of some new prudery.” Meanwhile, she faced taunts from some feminists for saying she was bisexual (she was married at the time), but not gay. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, but also expressing faith in the redemptive power of women’s liberation. She labeled traditional marriage an artifact of patriarchy and concluded with chapters condemning the misogyny of authors Henry Miller, D.H. Millett chronicled millennia of legal, political and cultural exclusion and diminishment, whether the “penis envy” theory of Sigmund Freud or the portrayals of women as disrupters of paradise in the Bible and Greek mythology. Millett’s book was among the most talked-about works of its time and remains a founding text for cultural and gender studies programs. “Sexual Politics” was published in 1970, in the midst of feminism’s so-called “second wave,” when Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Millett and others built upon the achievements of the suffragettes from a half-century earlier and challenged assumptions about women in virtually every aspect of society. The publishing house that carried her books in French also confirmed the death but provided no details. 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 authorized to speak for the family. 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.
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