Katherine Murray “Kate” Millett is an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She is an acknowledged leader of the modern women’s movement.
Millett was born in 1934 in Saint Paul, Minnesota to James Albert and Helen Feely Millett. The family’s background was Irish Catholic, and Kate attended several parochial schools. Her father was an alcoholic, and abandoned the family when she was 14. Millet continued her education at the University of Minnesota, and graduated magna cum laude in 1956 with a BA in English Literature. Millett then attended St Hilda’s College, Oxford where she gained a master’s degree with first-class honours in 1958. She was the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors by St. Hilda’s.
Millett then returned to the United States, where she began teaching at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. She left the position mid-semester to move to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. She supported herself working as a file clerk in a bank and as a kindergarten teacher in Harlem. In 1961, Millett moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University for three years while studying sculpting. While in Tokyo, she had her first one-woman show at the Minami Gallery.
In 1963, Millett moved back to the US where she taught English and exhibited her art work at Barnard College. Millett was part of a group of other young, radical and untenured educators at Barnard College who were interested in modernising women’s education. Millet, wanting to provide them with the critical tools to understand their position in a patriarchal society, wrote ’Token Learning’. Millett was also studying a doctorate at Columbia University, where she was a vocal organiser for women’s liberation and a militant champion of other progressive causes, including abortion reform and student rights. She was also a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the peace movement. ‘Token Learning’, coupled with her activism lead to her dismissal from her position at Barnard College in 1968.
In 1970, Millett was awarded with a Ph.D with distinction from Columbia University. Her thesis, Sexual Politics had started as a short manifesto that she had read at a women’s liberation meeting at Cornell University. She then developed this into her doctoral dissertation. Sexual Politics was rare in that it was one of the few doctoral dissertations published outside of the academic community. It was a huge success, selling 80,000 copies in the year it was first published. The book defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement and was a critique of patriarchy in Western society. It also dealt with the sexism and heterosexism of modern novelists D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer and contrasted their perspectives with the dissenting viewpoint of Jean Genet. She stated that undoing the traditional family was the key to true sexual revolution. The book transformed Millett into a public figure. She became a spokesperson for the feminism movement, and was a member of the National Organisation for Women, New York Radical Women,[10] Radicalesbians, and Downtown Radical Women organisations. Millett appeared in a Time cover story, “The Politics of Sex” that year. In the article, Sexual Politics was named a “remarkable book” that provided a coherent theory about the feminist movement.
In 1970, Millett taught sociology at Bryn Mawr College and began buying and restoring property near Poughkeepsie, New York. The properties became the Women’s Art Colony and Tree Farm, a community of women artists and writers and Christmas tree farm. In 2012, it became the Millett Center for the Arts. In 1972, she began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1974, Millett published her autobiography, Flying. In it, she details the torment she suffered as a result of her views, perceptions of her as arrogant and elitist and the disclosure that she was a lesbian. She went on to publish two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). She also wrote about: the political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001). In addition to her writing, she has also produce the documentary Three Lives and wrote Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography.
In 2001, Millett won the Best Books Award for Mother Millett from Library Journal and a year later she was awarded one of the 2012 Courage Award for the Arts by Yoko Ono. The Award had been created by Ono to recognize artists, musicians, collectors, curators, writers—those who sought the truth in their work and had the courage to stick to it, no matter what” and “honour their work as an expression of my vision of courage”. She has also been awarded the Lambda Pioneer Award for Literature, been honoured in the the summer of 2011 at a Veteran Feminists of America gala and been inducted into the U.S. National Women’s Hall of Fame for being a “real pillar of the women’s movement”.