The Liberation of Kate Millet

THERE is the past as well as the present in Kate Millett's declaration, "Women's Liberation is my life." In a voice barely above a murmur, trembling at times with emotion, she speaks of the experiences that produced Sexual Politics with the same articulate rage that distinguishes her book.

She excoriates much about her middleclass, Irish-Catholic childhood in St. Paul: the strict parochial schooling, financial hardships, the attitudes of her neighbors. But nothing dominates her memory as do the personalities of her parents: a father who beat her and her sisters, then walked out on them when she was 14; a mother who found barriers to earning a living.

Born in 1934, Kate was the second of three Millett daughters, who "should all have been sons. I remember seeing my father getting the news that the youngest was born ... the look on his face: three errors in a row. I like my father now, but I'm also not ever going to forget what he did to us when I was a kid. Six feet one and really angry, he was mind-blowing frightening.

"My mother had a college degree, and when she needed a job, what did they offer her? A job demonstrating potato peelers in the basement of a department store. She didn't take it." Instead, Mrs. Millett sold insurance on commission; the first year, with three children to support, she made less than $1,000. "If you're a man, the insurance company finds out what the family needs and pays you a salary. But women don't get a salary . . . she got no help from society."

Kate entered the University of Minnesota at 17, finished in eleven quarters instead of the usual twelve. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude and "went to Oxford to be a scholar." She was scholar enough to earn a coveted first in English literature, specializing in the Victorians.

"I have a lot of trouble getting jobs," Kate says, and the 1,100 letters she wrote from England before turning up a teaching position was just one example. When she moved to New York a year later, employment agencies asked about her typing speed. "From Oxford to the Bowery in one easy lesson," says Millett.

For two years, Kate worked on learning to be a sculptor and how to pay the bills that wouldn't wait. "I got very good at pathetic letters." She moved to Japan in 1961; during her two years there she had her first artistic success in a show of her "chug" sculpture--bits of scrap representing soapbox-derby cars. She also met Sculptor Fumio Yoshimura. They returned to New York, where Kate began teaching--first at Hunter, then at Barnard--and working on her Ph.D. at Columbia. She lived with Fumio for a year, and "for what it's worth, being committed to each other and loving each other, we were already married. It's not the state's business." But when the state sent Fumio deportation papers in 1965, "we went to City Hall." They have no children, Fumio explains, because they are "two individuals. We cannot really construct a family system, because if we start to feel possessive, that's the end of our relationship."

"She was a very ordinary American liberal when I met her," Yoshimura says. But in the winter of 1964-65, Kate Millett attended a lecture series that was to make an extraordinary difference in her life. The lectures were titled "Are Women Emancipated?" Kate thought, "this is going to be one of those put-down sort of things, but maybe they'll take my point of view. All my life, guys said I was neurotic. I didn't accept my femininity, they said.

"At the next to the last lecture, I got all het up. Afterward, a girl came up to me and said, 'You look kinda interested in this; did you know there are civil rights for women?' And I thought like wow, this is for me."

Kate attended her first official Women's Liberation meeting soon afterward: "They said we need to have somebody to be chairman of education, and there was clearly nobody else to do it." The new education chairman for NOW "sat down and wrote this poop sheet" about women's colleges, Token Learning, a radical dissection of the quality of women's higher education.

For Kate, there was picketing, completing her Ph.D. course work, giving an impassioned speech at a faculty meeting during the Columbia University strike and the formation of new Women's Liberation groups. In November 1968, she made a speech at Cornell University. "I wrote a paper called 'Sexual Politics,' which was the germ of this whole book. It was a fiery little speech directed at girls, witty and tart and stuff like that--at least I thought it was. I used to listen to it rhapsodically on tape. It needed a job of editing, but at the time, I thought it was glorious."

Two days before Christmas, however, Kate was dropped from the faculty at Barnard. "Good old Christmas. I remember worrying about the presents. I was up against the wall." So she started to work on the thesis that was to become the book.

"I was trying to trace the reasons why the first phase of the sexual revolution started, and how it changed, through the currents of literature . . . showing how literature reflects certain sides of our life, the way diamonds reflect life--or the way a broken bottle does. From culture criticism it got bigger and bigger until I was almost making a political philosophy." Kate started the thesis in February of 1969, finished it in September, revised it until March 1970, when she defended it for her Ph.D. "I was really afraid to write this book so much. I used to go crazy with terror about it." But for 14, 16, 18 hours a day, she wrote it: "In eight months, 1 had 21 days off."

She works almost as hard now, since the release of the book, as she did writing it. A constant stream of interviewers works its way through her loft on the Bowery; telephone calls and personal appearances intrude on her casual dashiki-workpants-sandals lifestyle. The attention rubs off on her family, too; in St. Paul, her mother states her firm support of Kate's work, but wishes she would "dress herself up. Kate's missing the boat if she appears on the Mike Douglas Show without her hair washed."

Against her will, the grueling work has earned her a symbolic position in a movement whose "whole philosophy is that there is no one person who is symbolic," she says. "All I can do is exercise a lot of ingenuity. We've come a long way from the picket line protesting in front of the New York Times, baby. Now we've got to keep it up and not get corrupted and not get smug."

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