She wrote Sexual Politics as a dissertation in the English department at Columbia, but, graduate student or not, she was going to get to the bottom of how her sex came to be so degraded-if she had to take on all of human history to do it. But what set her apart was the breadth of her intellectual ambition. Germaine Greer and Shulamith Firestone did the same thing, but they didn’t make the cover of Time, as Millett did. This didn’t endear her to the members of those circles, who didn’t like it when a sister turned into a media star. She popularized the ideas bubbling up in the radical feminist circles of New York and London. After Millett came Adrienne Rich, Elaine Showalter, academic feminism, gender theory, queer studies, and all the still-ramifying dismantlings of patriarchy that dominate the study of culture today. But Woolf was a more traditional reader, if also a subtler and more brilliant one, and not quite so single-mindedly focused on sex. Millett was preceded by a great many other “lady critics,” as they were then infuriatingly called, the most estimable being, of course, Virginia Woolf. You may not agree that literature is the proper medium for consciousness-raising, but you can’t deny that Millett made reading a life-changing, even world-changing, act. You could go to novels and poems for an education in sex as power. Lawrence-introduced a new and remarkably durable idea: you could interpret literature in light of its gender dynamics. Her urgent, elegant 1970 masterwork, Sexual Politics, with its wry takedowns of the casual misogyny and rape scenes that had made the reputations of the sexual revolutionaries du jour-Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, D.H. Let me state it plainly: Millett invented feminist literary criticism. Maybe Second Wave feminism now seems so far away that we’re hazy about what once made it so thrilling and threatening.
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When Kate Millett died, half-forgotten, on September 6 at the age of eighty-two, obituary writers struggled to take the full measure of this pioneering feminist writer and activist. Kate Millett with one of her sculptures at her studio at 295 Bowery, New York City, July 7, 1967
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