Kate Millett

Kate Millett was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1934. She studied at the University of Minnesota and Oxford, earning first-class honours in English literature. She later worked as a teacher and artist in Japan and New York.

Her doctoral research at Columbia became “Sexual Politics” (1970). Through readings of writers including D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, Millett examined how literature reproduced male authority. Her argument that relations between the sexes were political helped make the book a central text of second-wave feminism.

Public attention also exposed the pressures surrounding sexuality within the women’s movement. Millett identified as bisexual and had relationships with women as well as a long marriage to the sculptor Fumio Yoshimura. In “Flying” (1974) and “Sita” (1977), she wrote directly about love, desire and the demands of public life.

Her activism extended to opposition to forced psychiatric treatment, drawing on her own experiences. She continued making art and supporting women artists. Millett died in Paris in 2017, aged eighty-two.