Fembio Special: Famous Lesbians
Kate Millett
born on September 14, 1934 in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States
died on September 6, 2017 in Paris, France
US-American feminist theorist and activist; artist
90th birthday on September 14, 2024
Biography
In 1998 Millett described her anxieties and frustrations in an article published in the Guardian, a progressive British daily newspaper. She feared poverty in old age.
She had fallen increasingly into obscurity after having experienced the 1970s as a public figure. Lectureships had failed to materialize and her books were out of print. The revenue from her farm was insufficient, and she was facing serious financial difficulties. Despite her publications and her academic qualifications, she had been unable to find adequate employment. She was of the belief that her market value had declined since her activism during the second wave of feminism; Sexual Politics, her groundbreaking examination of the “politics of the patriarchy” published in 1970, was apparently regarded as outdated. She was encountering competition from the younger feminist academics.
When the Guardian published the article, she actually felt slightly embarrassed as in the heavily edited version only the negative aspects remained. Yet its impact was positive: Sexual Politics was reprinted; she was offered teaching positions; her art was exhibited.
Kate Millett was born in Minnesota in 1934 and studied at the University of Minnesota, St. Hilda's (Oxford) and Columbia University in New York. In 1961 she moved to Japan, where she married her artist colleague Fumio Yoshimura in 1965. She separated from him in the 1970s. She worked as a painter, photographer, sculptor, filmmaker, publicist, writer and feminist/political activist.
With the publication of Sexual Politics, she suddenly became a public figure. Her coming out as a lesbian alienated her from the hetero-feminist mainstream of the time. It was a period of extreme commitment: she devoted herself to lectures, interviews, teaching, publications, artistic work, international exhibitions, and political activism.
The lesbian relationship she described in Sita (1977) failed. Her farm was unprofitable. In 1979, she traveled to Iran to support the burgeoning women's rights movement. She was expelled from the country.
The pressure was too much for her. She described her breakdown and disastrous stay in a psychiatric ward in 1990 in The Loony-Bin Trip (1993). Millett had been diagnosed as manic-depressive and given psychotropic drugs. After her release she had been haunted by the fear of being truly insane. Yet when she had reduced the dosage of the medications due to their severe side effects nothing had actually happened; in all probability, the diagnosis of manic-depressive had been false. Badly shaken by the experience but with her spirit unbroken, Millett became active in the anti-psychiatry movement.
(Text from 2003; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
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