How forgotten is Kate Millett? When I stop by my local bookstore to pick up a copy of “Sexual Politics,” it doesn’t occur to me that I won’t find her seminal work, the one that all but launched the second wave of the women’s movement. It’s worth noting that this is not a chain, where a militant feminist author of the 1970s might not be missed…
“Let’s see … Kate Millett,” she taps at the computer and stares at the screen, searching the store’s database and, it appears from her puzzled expression, her own. “Wasn’t she a feminist?”
“Yes,” I say, and as if delivering an eighth-grade book report, I add, “Millett was very famous 30 years ago; a revolutionary…”
How is it that the great Kate Millett has nearly vanished from the collective consciousness?
"Salon People | Kate Millett, the ambivalent feminist
[Note: If you wish, see also this article about her which was the cover story for Time Magazine three months before my birth, in 1970, the cover of which appears below, and/or these photos from 1992, when I first met Kate: Kate Millett’s Art Colony for Women - a set on Flickr]
Happy 74th birthday, Kate.
