"Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different." -- Kate Millett
Kate Millett (born Katherine Murray Millett on 14 September 1934 in St. Paul, Minnesota) is an American feminist writer and activist. She is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics.
"A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.""Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?""As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history.""Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.""However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.""I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully.""I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.""I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility.""In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property.""Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?""It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.""It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.""Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.""Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard.""Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.""My sister said, You're making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.""Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.""Psychiatry causes so much death.""The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.""The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.""The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.""They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.""They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.""This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.""This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.""We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.""We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.""We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.""What is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them?""What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it.""What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.""With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.""You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin."
Kate 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.
Millett moved to Japan in 1961. 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 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.
Millet 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 (2006).
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.
