Kate Millett

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Kate Millett, 1970

Katherine Murray "Kate" Millett (born September 14, 1934 in St. Paul , † September 6, 2017 in Paris ) was an American literary scholar , writer , sculptor and feminist . Her scientific work Sexual Politics (1970; German: Sexus und Herrschaft , 1971) is one of the classics of feminism.

Life

Kate Millett grew up with two sisters in St. Paul, Minnesota . Her parents were Irish Catholics . Her mother, Helen Millett, worked as a teacher and was involved in the civil rights movement , advocating gay rights and taking to the streets against the Vietnam War . After her alcoholic husband left the family when Kate was 14 years old, she sold insurance to support her three daughters.

Kate Millett graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English . A wealthy aunt made it possible for her to study at Oxford , where she received her Masters at St Hilda's College in 1958, the first American woman to receive the highest distinction. She then taught English literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro . In 1961 she went to Tokyo. She taught English and studied sculpture at Waseda University . During this time she met the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura . In 1963 Kate Millett returned to New York with Yoshimura and lived with him in a loft on the Bowery . They married in 1965.

She taught English and philosophy at Barnard College . In 1968 she was fired for supporting students protesting against the Vietnam War . Since she no longer had an income and Yoshimura earned little in a sweat shop , she decided to realize her ideas for a dissertation. She received her PhD from Columbia University with magna cum laude in English and Comparative Literature. Her dissertation was published as a book under the title Sexual Politics in 1970 and became a bestseller. She has published numerous supplementary articles and essays and ten other books. Millett has taught at Bryn Mawr College , California State University, Sacramento, and the University of California, Berkeley . In 1985 she divorced Yoshimura.

In the late 1990s, Millett was increasingly forgotten. She lived from the proceeds founded in 1978 Art Colony for Women on their farm in Poughkeepsie in New York State , she had bought 1,971th She could no longer find a position corresponding to her academic qualification. In 1998, she described her frustration and fear of old-age poverty in the English daily newspaper The Guardian . In the following years Sexual Politics was reissued, Millett received teaching positions and exhibitions. A retrospective entitled Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Years with installations, sculptures, drawings and photographs took place in 1997 at the Center for Contemporary Art in Northampton . In 2012 her farm was recognized as a non-profit organization and renamed the Millett Center for the Arts , where Millett sponsored female artists from around the world.

Kate Millett died suddenly at the age of 82 of a heart attack while visiting Paris with her longtime partner, photojournalist and artist Sophie Keir. They had married shortly before.

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Cover of Sexual Politics , 1971

Millett was an influential feminist theorist and equally active as a writer of predominantly autobiographical and documentary prose and as an artist. Between 1963 and 2009 she had numerous solo exhibitions in Japan and the USA. She created sculptures and installations in which she dealt with cultural patterns of meaning of gender. As a political activist, she fought for the rights of women, homosexuals and the elderly. She strongly advocated torture and psychiatric victims and against discrimination against prostitutes. Her book The politics of cruelty (dehumanization) is an empathic plea against torture. In 2001 she was the UN delegate for people with psychiatric disabilities.

Her public work as a women's rights activist began when she was appointed first chairman of the education committee of the newly formed feminist National Organization for Women in 1966 . In 1968 she published a study of American women's colleges entitled Token Learning , in which she documented that women were trained in tradition- conscious “ gentility ” and “service” rather than performance and leadership. The trial was a furious indictment and resulted in Rutgers University being the first to promote excellence among women.

In her scholarly work Sexual Politics , Millet examined how patriarchy developed in Western societies and is defended by law, medicine, and science. She argued that "sexuality is an often neglected political aspect" and that the relationship between the sexes should always be understood politically. She analyzed the descriptions of female sexuality by authors such as DH Lawrence , Henry Miller , Norman Mailer as misogynous and dealt with, among others, Sigmund Freud's theories about the essence of women. She combined her critical literary considerations with sociological and anthropological ones. Millett fundamentally questioned the structure of the political and countered this with a first-person policy that was to shape the autonomous women's movement of the 1970s. Sexual Politics is influenced by Simone de Beauvoir's work The Other Sex (1949) and written in the style of passionate polemics. Shortly after publication, Time magazine appeared with a portrait of Millett on the cover, painted by Alice Neel , and a review in which Millett was called "Mao Tse-Tung of Women's Liberation." Alongside Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970), the book is considered one of the most influential theoretical texts of the women's movement and is still today a basic work for dealing with the relationship between gender and culture. Gloria Steinem described the book as her wake-up call. In 2016 a new edition was published in the USA.

Her two-volume narrative work Flying (1974) is autobiographical and deals, among other things, with her marriage to Fumio Yoshimura and the agony she suffered after revealing that she was a lesbian . She wrote three other autobiographical novels, including Sita (1977) about a love affair with a woman who had failed.

After the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini , she and Sophie Keir went to Iran in 1979 at the invitation of Iranian feminists to give lectures on women's rights on International Women's Day and to document the political situation. One day after the religious leaders of the Islamic Republic prescribed the hijab , they took part in a large demonstration in front of Tehran University , the start of the Iranian women's liberation movement, followed by other demonstrations. French and Iranian feminists made a film for which they interviewed Millett. She described the events and political repression in Iran in the book Going to Iran , illustrated with photos by Sophie Keir. It is the day-to-day report of an eyewitness.

Millett was admitted against her will to a mental hospital twice in the United States from 1973 and once in Ireland against her will; in Ireland she was forced to take psychiatric drugs. The "struggle to assert their autonomy against the authority of psychiatry and, in a broader sense, against the authoritarian society in general", she described in the book The Loony Bin Trip (German: Der Klapsmühlentrip ). Marilyn Yalom described it in the Washington Post as a “powerful anti-institutional scream” such as no one has sent out in the literature on madness since Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest .

Her book Mother Millett is about the last years of her mother's life. When Kate Millett learned that her mother was terminally ill, she returned to Minnesota, took her mother out of the nursing home and accompanied her until she died.

Awards and honors

  • 2001: Library Journal Best Books Award for Mother Millett
  • 2011: Lambda Pioneer Award for Literature
  • 2012: Visual arts grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (New York)
  • 2012: Yoko Ono Lennon's Courage Award for the Arts
  • 2013: National Women's Hall of Fame
  • 2014: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Minnesota

Fonts (excerpt)

Movies

  • Three Lives (1971), documentary feature

further reading

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Return of the troublemaker: Kate Millett. In: The Guardian. June 19, 2001.
  2. ↑ a b c d Parul Sehgal, Neil Genzlinger: Kate Millett, Ground-Breaking Feminist Writer, Is Dead at 82 . In: The New York Times . September 6, 2017, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed September 9, 2017]).
  3. ^ A b Claire Armitstead: Kate Millett, pioneering second-wave feminist, dies aged 82. In: The Guardian. 7th September 2017.
  4. ↑ Dr Kate Millett - English, 1956 , St Hilda's College
  5. ↑ Kate Millett: Sexual Politics. Introduction to the 1990 edition.
  6. ↑ a b c Millett, Kate - National Women's Hall of Fame . In: National Women's Hall of Fame . ( womenofthehall.org [accessed September 9, 2017]).
  7. ↑ Kate Millett's biography at FemBio
  8. ^ Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Years - Center for Art Design and Visual Culture - UMBC. Retrieved September 9, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Kate Millett is dead. In: Spiegel online . September 6, 2017. Retrieved September 7, 2017.
  10. ↑ Kate Millett: Mental Illness - A Phantom? In: Peter Lehmann & Peter Stastny (eds.): "Statt Psychiatrie 2", ISBN 978-3-925931-38-3 , Berlin / Eugene / Shrewsbury: Antipsychiatrieverlag 2007, pp. 26-36.
  11. ↑ Ulrike Baureithel: On the death of Kate Millett. The breakout. In: Der Tagesspiegel. 7th September 2017.
  12. ^ A b Melissa Anderson: Living Proof. In: Artforum . 2nd of July 2013.
  13. ↑ Hamid Naficy: A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984. Duke University Press, Durham 2012, ISBN 978-0-8223-4865-8 , pp. 106 ff.
  14. ^ Review by Patricia J. Higgins in: Signs. Vol. 9, No. 1, Women and Religion , Fall 1983, pp. 154-156, The University of Chicago Press, JSTOR
  15. ↑ Kate Millett: The Loony-Bin Trip . University of Illinois Press, 2000, ISBN 0-252-06888-2 , pp. 11 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  16. ^ Thomas Steinbuch: "Take Your Pill Dear": Kate Millett and Psychiatry's Dark Side . In: Hypatia . tape 8 , 1, Winter 1993, pp. 197 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1527-2001.1993.tb00639.x .
  17. ↑ Swantje Koch-Kanz, Luise F. Pusch: Elizabeth Packard 1811-1897. Crusade against the willful imprisonment of women in asylums . In: Sibylle Duda, Luise F. Pusch (ed.): WahnsinnsFrauen . 1st edition. Third volume. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-39334-0 , pp. 68 .
  18. ↑ "These are subversive questions and they point to and invoke the main theme of her book: the struggle to assert one's autonomy against the authority of psychiatry and, by extension, against authoritarian society in general." Thomas Steinbuch: "Take Your Pill Dear ." ": Kate Millett and Psychiatry's Dark Side . In: Hypatia . tape 8 , 1, Winter 1993, 1993, pp. 198 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1527-2001.1993.tb00639.x .
  19. ↑ Emily Langer: Kate Millett, 'high priestess' of second-wave feminism, dies at 82. In: The Washington Post. September 7, 2017; Marilyn Yalom: Kate Millett's mental politics. In: The Washington Post. May 13, 1990. Retrieved September 10, 2017.
  20. ^ Grants to Artists, Visual Arts 2012: Kate Millett, Foundation for Contemporary Arts
  21. ↑ Kate Millett, 'Pillar of the Movement,' Inducted into Women's Hall of Fame
  22. ^ Kate Millett Honorary Degree Recipient, University of Minnesota Web site
personal data
SURNAME Millett, Kate
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Millett, Katherine Murray (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar, writer, and feminist
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Paul
DATE OF DEATH 6th September 2017
Place of death Paris