One morning in 1970, on a day she was to speak at Emory University, Kate Millett—erstwhile sculptor, recent Ph.D. student, and now, to her chagrin, the spokeswoman of the Women’s Liberation Movement—stood up from the breakfast table and promptly vomited all over one of two Persian rugs covering the floors of her Bowery apartment. Her husband, the sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, looked on in dismay. The expensive rug was a new addition to Millett’s life. It had been purchased in a week of “libertine glory,” when Millett spent all of the $800 earned from the sale of her first book, Sexual Politics, on two carpets and an old car. Soon enough, the book would earn Millett $30,000—at the time, a small fortune. In her own words, she was “shamefully, pointlessly rich.” She was also miserable.

It had been a momentous 18 months for the self-identified “downtown sculptor,” a woman used to running in bohemian circles. In February of 1969, she was a doctoral candidate in English at Columbia University as well as a dedicated feminist activist, a member of the Redstockings and the New York Radical Feminists. Two months earlier, she had been dismissed from her teaching appointment at Barnard for her leading role in the 1968 student protests. Without a source of income and, in her words, “up against a wall,” she began to work urgently on her thesis. Millett decided to expand a “witty and tart” paper, also called “Sexual Politics,” that she’d delivered at Cornell the prior year. In the expanded version, she would trace the way literature reflected the sexual revolution and counterrevolution. As she later told Time, the project “got bigger and bigger until I was almost making a political philosophy.” She filed the dissertation in 1970; one of her advisers compared the experience of reading the work to “sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker.” She managed to get the book published by Doubleday. Holding the first copy in her hands, she was both elated and nervous, worried about its reception in the mainstream press as well as the response of her fellow radical feminists.



The reactions of both camps went beyond anything Millett could have anticipated. Suddenly, she was wanted on every college campus. She was invited onto daytime talk shows. (Her Minnesotan mother warned her against appearing onscreen with unwashed hair.) Her book appeared in editorial cartoons. Her phone rang constantly. Her portrait, by the painter Alice Neel, graced the cover of Time; the magazine crowned her “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.” At the time of the cover story, Sexual Politics had sold more than 15,000 copies and was in its fourth printing.



At the same time, Millett was in demand at feminist rallies and caucuses. Audiences pressed her to announce her sexuality, and there was a lot riding on her answer. At the dawn of the decade, the movement was divided over the question of homosexuality. Betty Friedan, who seemed to launch feminism’s second wave with her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, had been hostile to concerns of lesbians; in 1969, she called them a “lavender menace.” Lesbians reclaimed Friedan’s insult, printing it on their t-shirts when they protested the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City. This was the fractious feminist movement that Millett was supposed to head. She first came out as bisexual (disappointing her Catholic family), then later as a lesbian. This drew her into new organizing circles, where her romantic life was closely watched.

Sexual Politics by Kate Millett Columbia University Press, 416 pp., $25.00

Millett wasn’t prepared for this kind of attention. (She would later be diagnosed with manic depression, a diagnosis that she has rejected.) Impassioned and impulsive, she didn’t have the disposition to play spokesperson for a movement. “Better to operate on an even keel like Friedan and Gloria and the others,” she later reflected. “All far better politicians. But I am not a politician. Not ‘Kate Millett of Women’s Lib’ either.” And though Millett wasn’t averse to overseas trips—she’d studied Victorian literature at Oxford, then sculpture in Japan—the constant travel took its toll; appropriately, her memoir of these years is called Flying. The words that recur in it are “crazy,” “dizzy,” and “overwhelmed.”