I was 19 years old when I bought a first edition of “Sexual Politics” in 1970. Kate Millett’s first book, published the year before, was that unlikeliest phenomenon — a dissertation heard around the world. What I remember most about that year was the dizzying experience of reading Ms. Millett, who died on Wednesday, and the new theories of her sister feminists that came in its wake. Like one of Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Rooms,” my consciousness, and that of the women I knew, gained new dimensions.

In my library today, that volume of “Sexual Politics” sits next to the feminist classics that soon followed. Both “The Dialectic of Sex” by Shulamith Firestone and “Sisterhood is Powerful,” Robin Morgan’s ambitious anthology, appeared in 1970. The following year, Germaine Greer published “The Female Eunuch” in the United States. Each year thereafter brought a major new work: Phyllis Chesler’s “Women and Madness” (1972); Mary Daly’s “Beyond God the Father” (1973); Andrea Dworkin’s “Woman Hating” (1974); and Susan Brownmiller’s “Against Our Will” (1975).

These women and many others, including Adrienne Rich and Angela Davis, offered new insights, shaking foundation after foundation for me and my peers. But it was Ms. Millett’s book that made us feminists.

I remember staring at Alice Neel’s image of a confident-looking Ms. Millett on a Time magazine cover in August 1970. It made me feel a little indomitable, too. That fall, I started to offer feminist analyses in my literature classes. Maybe I wasn’t ready to take on the world, but I could take on John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”