Millet, Kate

   b. 1934, St Paul, Minnesota (USA)

   Writer

   An American feminist, Kate Millett became well known in the UK with the publication of her first book, Sexual Politics (1970) (her doctoral dissertation at Columbia). She argued that nearly all relations between men and women are determined by the male establishment’s need to preserve its power over women. She claimed that assigning women to their traditional role of social work was akin to asking them to clean the Augean stable. They were thereby disabled from discovering and eliminating the structural inequities which guaranteed the inferior position of women in a patriarchal society. She is seen nowadays as not having taken a strong enough feminist line in her writing, and of not countenancing other forms of sexuality than the heterosexual.

   See also: feminist theory

   MIKE STORRY