Katherine Murray Millett (September 14, 1934 - September 6, 2017) is an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. He studied at Oxford University and was the first American woman to earn a first-class honors degree after studying at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. He has been described as a "seminal influence on second wave feminism", and is famous for his book Sexual Politics (1970), based on his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes "previously unimaginable" legal abortions, gender equality between sex, and sexual freedom "that was made possible in part by Millett's efforts.
Feminist movements, human rights, peace, civil rights, and anti-psychiatry are some of Millett's main causes. His books are motivated by his activism, such as women's rights and mental health reform, and some are autobiographical life narographs that explore his sexuality, mental health, and relationships. In the 1960s and 1970s, Millett taught at Waseda University, Bryn Mawr College, Barnard College, and University of California, Berkeley. Some of his later works include The Politics of Cruelty (1994), of state-sanctioned torture in many countries, and Mother Millett (2001), a book about his relationship with his mother. Between 2011 and 2013, he won the Lambda Pioneer Award for Literature, received the Yoko Ono Bravery Award for Art, and was sworn in to the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Millett was born and raised in Minnesota, and then spent most of his adult life in Manhattan and Woman's Art Colony, founded in Poughkeepsie, New York, which became the Millett Art Center in 2012. Millet came out as a lesbian in the political book year Sexually published. He married a sculptor Fumio Yoshimura (1965 to 1985) and then, until his death in 2017, he married Sophie Keir.
Video Kate Millett
Early life and education
Katherine Murray Millett was born on September 14, 1934 from James Albert and Helen (nÃÆ' Â © e Feely) Millett in Saint Paul, Minnesota. According to Millett, he was afraid of his father, an engineer, who beat him. He was an alcoholic who left the family when he was 14, "handed them over to a poor life". His mother is a teacher and an insurance salesman. She has two sisters, Sally and Mallory; the latter is one of the subjects of Three Lives . From Irish Catholic heritage, Kate Millett attended a parish school in Saint Paul throughout her childhood.
Millett graduated in 1956 magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Arts in English literature; she is a member of Kappa Alpha Theta student. A rich aunt paid for her education at St Hilda College, Oxford earned her a degree in English literature, with praise, in 1958. She was the first American woman to be awarded a first-class honors degree after studying at St. Hilda.. After spending about 10 years as an educator and artist, Millett entered the graduate program for English and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1968, where he taught English at Barnard. While there, he championed the rights of the students, the liberation of women, and the reform of abortion. He completed his dissertation in September 1969 and was awarded a doctorate, with a difference, in March 1970.
Maps Kate Millett
Careers and activism
Early career as an artist and educator
Millett taught English at the University of North Carolina after graduating from Oxford University, but he went mid-term to study art.
In New York City he worked as a kindergarten teacher and learned to sculpt and paint from 1959-61. He then moved to Japan and studied sculptures. Millett meets fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, has the first female show at Tokyo Minami Gallery, and teaches English at Waseda University. He left Japan in 1963 and moved to the Lower East Side of New York.
Millett teaches English and exhibits his art at Barnard College beginning in 1964. He is one of a group of young, radical, and tireless educators who want to modernize women's education; Millett wanted to give them "the essential tools necessary to understand their position in a patriarchal society." His views on radical politics, his "stinging attack" on Barnard in Token Learning, and his budget cuts on campus caused him to be dismissed on December 23, 1968. His artwork was featured in an exhibit at Judson Gallery of Greenwich Village. During these years Millett became interested in the Peace and Civil Rights movement, joined the Race Equality Congress (INTI), and participated in their protests.
In 1971, Millett taught sociology at Bryn Mawr College. He started buying and restoring property that year, near Poughkeepsie, New York; this became the Women's Art Colony and Tree Plantation, a community of female artists and writers and Christmas tree farms. Two years later he was an educator at the University of California, Berkeley.
Feminism and sexuality
Feminism
Millett was a prominent figure in the women's movement, or second wave feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1966, Millett became a member of the committee of the National Organization for Women and later joined the organization Radicalesbians, Radicalesbians, and Downtown Radical Women in New York.
He contributed the section "Sexual politics (in literature)" to the 1970's anthology He became the spokesperson for the feminist movement after the success of the book Sexual Politics (1970), but fought with contradictory perceptions of him as arrogant and elitist, and the hope of others to speak for them, which he covered in his 1974 book , Fly . Gayle's biographer Graham Yates says that "Millett articulates the theory of patriarchy and conceptualizes gender and women's sexual oppression in terms of demanding the sex-role revolution with radical changes in personal and family lifestyle." Betty Friedan's focus, as a comparison, is to increase social and political leadership opportunities and economic independence for women. Millett wrote several books on women's lives from a feminist perspective. For example, in the book The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979), completed for four years, he recorded the torture and murder of the Indianapolis teenager Sylvia Likens by Gertrude Baniszewski in 1965 who had occupied himself. for 14 years. With a feminist perspective, he explores the story of the helpless girl and the individual dynamics involved in his sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Biographer Roberta M. Hooks writes, "Regardless of any feminist polemic, The Basement can stand on its own as a deeply felt and touching study in writing of the problem of cruelty and submission." Millett said about the motivation of the perpetrator: "This is a story of the oppression of women Gertrude seems to want to give a very bad justice to this girl: that this is to be a woman." Millett and Sophie Keir, a Canadian journalist, traveled to Tehran, Iran in 1979 for the Committee on Artistic and Intellectual Freedom to work for the rights of Iranian women. Their journey follows actions taken by Ayatollah Khomeini's government to prevent girls from attending school with boys, to ask women who work to wear a veil, and not to allow women to divorce their husbands. Thousands of women attended a rally held at Tehran University on International Women's Day, March 8. About 20,000 women attend parades through Freedom Square in the city; many of them stabbed, beaten, or threatened with acid. Millett and Keir, who had attended demonstrations and demonstrations, were ejected from their hotel room and taken to a locked room at the immigration base two weeks after they arrived in Iran. They were threatened that they might be imprisoned and, knowing that homosexuals were executed in Iran, Millett was also afraid he might be killed when he heard officials discuss his lesbianism. After an overnight stay, the women were put on a plane that landed in Paris. Although Millett was relieved to have arrived safely in France, he worried about the fate of the Iranian lady left behind, "They can not get on a plane, that's why international fraternity is so important." He wrote about the experience in his 1981 Going to Iran book. Sexual Policies
Sexual Politics originated as a Millett PhD dissertation and published in 1970, the same year that he was awarded a doctorate from Columbia University. The best-selling book, patriarchal critique in Western society and literature, discusses the sexism and heterosexism of modern novelist D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer and contrasts their perspectives with a different perspective from homosexual writer Jean Genet. Millett questions the origins of patriarchy, arguing that sex-based oppression is political and cultural, and presupposes that avoiding the traditional family is the key to a true sexual revolution. In its first year on the market, the book sold 80,000 copies and was sold through seven prints and considered the manifesto of the movement.
As a symbol of the women's liberation movement, Millett is featured in the cover story of Time magazine, The Politics of Sex, called the "Sexual Politics " extraordinary book "that provides a coherent theory about feminist movements. Alice Neel created Millett's depiction for the cover of 31 August 1970.
According to biographer Peter Manso, The Prisoner of Sex was written by Norman Mailer in response to Millett's Sexuality . "The Prisoner of Sex is composed as a contest, its rhetoric against prose, its charm against its sincerity, its polemical anger against its very sharp accusations.The aim is to change a larger audience, a stronger presence. as the truth of sustenance. The Prisoner of Sex combines self-parody and satire... ", says Andrew Wilson, author of Norman Mailer: An American Aesthetic .
Sexism and sexuality
While Millett was talking about sexual liberation at Columbia University, a woman amongst the audience asked, "Why do not you say you're a lesbian, here, openly.You have said that you were a lesbian in the past." Millett hesitantly replied, "Yes, I'm a lesbian". A few weeks later, the December 8, 1970 "Lib Women: Second View" article reported that Millett admitted he was bisexual, which he said would likely discredit him as a spokesman for the feminist movement for "strengthening [d] the views of skeptics who routinely ignore all liberals as lesbians." In response, two days later the press conference was hosted by feminists Ivy Bottini and Barbara Love in Greenwich Village where they talked about their "solidarity with homosexual struggle to achieve their release in a sexist society" to Kate Millett and other participants.
Millett's 1971 film Three Lives is a 16mm documentary made by a crew of all women, including co-director Susan Kleckner, cameraman Lenore Bode, and editor Robin Mide, under the name Women's Liberation Cinema. The 70-minute film focuses on three women - Mallory Millett-Jones, the director's sister; Lillian Shreve, a chemist; and Robin Mide, an artist - relived their lives. Vincent Canby, The New York Times art critic ', writes: " Three Lives is a good and simple movie because it's impossible to bother to drew attention to himself, only for his three subjects, and how they grew up in a male-dominated society similar to Miss Millett, in his Sexual Politics, systematically unraveled, shaken, ridiculed and belittled - while, apparently, tickling her pink. "It received a" generally excellent review "after the premiere at the New York City theater.
In his 1971 book The Prostitution Papers Millett interpreted prostitution as being at the heart of her condition, showing women's submission more clearly than was done with a marriage contract. According to him, degradation and power, not sex, are being bought and sold in prostitution. He argues for the decriminalization of prostitution in the process directed by the sex workers themselves.
In 1974 and 1977, respectively, Millett published two autobiographical books. Fly (1974), "his awareness of bisexuality," which explores his life after the success of Sexuality in what is described in The New York Times Book Review > as an example of "fascinating pamerism". Millett captures life as he thinks, experiences and experiences it, in a style like a documentary. Sita (1977) explores her sexuality, especially her lesbian lover who committed suicide and its influence on Millett's personal and personal life.
In an interview with Mark Blasius, Millett sympathizes with the concept of intergenerational sex, describing the age of approval laws as "very oppressive" for the gay youth in particular but repeatedly reminding the interviewer that questions can not stop at older male sexual access. or women for children but rethinking about the rights of children is widely understood. Millett adds that "one of the essential rights of children is to express themselves sexually, perhaps especially with each other but with adults too" and that "the sexual freedom of children is an essential part of the sexual revolution... if you do not changing the social condition of your children still have inevitable inequalities ". In this interview, Millett criticized those who wished to abolish age-permit laws, saying that the issue was not focused on children's rights but was "approached as a male's right to have sex with children under the age of consent" and added that "there is no mention made of the relationship between women and girls".
Millett is featured in the feminist historical film He Is Beautiful When He Is Angry (2014).
1980s to 2000s
In 1980, Millett was one of the ten invited artists whose work was exhibited at the Big American Lesbian Art Exhibition at Woman's Building in Los Angeles. Millett is a contributor to the magazine On the Issues , and continues to write to the early 2000s. He discussed the state-sanctioned torture in The Politics of Cruelty (1994), which brought attention to the use of torture in many countries.
Millett was involved in the controversy that resulted from his appearance on a British television program called After Dark, when alcohol actor Oliver Reed, who had been drinking during the break, moved on to him and tried to kiss her. Millett pushed him away but allegedly later asked for a recording of the show to entertain his friends. Throughout the program Reed uses the sexist language.
Millett is also involved in prison reform and a campaign against torture. Journalist Maureen Freely writes about Millett's view of activism in his final years: "The best thing about being a freewheeler is that he can say what he likes because 'nobody gives me a seat in anything.I'm too old, cruel and rude. depending on how well you argue. ' "
Mother Millett
Kate wrote Mother Millett (2001) about her mother who in her last years had some serious health problems, including brain tumors and hypercalcaemia. Recognizing the deteriorating health of her mother, Millett visited her in Minnesota; Their visits include conversations about their relationships and baseball games, museums and restaurants. When her mother was no longer able to take care of herself in her apartment, she was placed in a nursing home in St. Louis. Paul, Minnesota, which is one of the greatest fears of Helen Millett. Kate visits her mother and is disturbed by the care she receives and her mother's morally defective attitude. Residents of a nursing home labeled as "behavioral issues", such as Helen, are subject to forced repression. Helen said to Kate, "Now that you're here, we can go."
Aware of the efforts her mother made to give her life, support and raise her, Millett became the nanny and coordinator of many daily therapies, and encouraged her mother to be active. He wanted to give him "freedom and dignity". In his article "His Own Mother", Pat Swift writes: "Helen Millett may be content to go" gently into that good night "- she is more afraid of nursing homes than dying - but Kate's daughter is a feminist fighter, activist human rights, gay liberation, writers, and artists, Kate Millett does not go gently through life and never hesitates to be angry at anyone - friend or foe, family or system - to the right that is felt wrong.When the dignity and quality his mother's ill life is at stake, the story of this book becomes inevitable. "Although Helen played a role in making her daughter committed to the University of Minnesota Mayo wing, Kate told her mother to move from a nursing home and return to her apartment, where the officer arranged her care. During this period, Millett could also "bluff" his mother because of his lack of cultural sophistication and the amount of television he watched and could be rude with caregivers.
Millett Art Center
In 2012, The Women Art Colony became a non-profit 501 (c) 3 organization and changed its name to Millett Center for the Arts.
Personal life
Interpersonal relations
Millett is not a "polite middle-class girl" that many parents of his generation and social circle desire: he can be difficult, honest, and tenacious. Liza Featherstone, author of "Daughterhood Is Powerful," said that this quality helped make it "one of the most influential radical feminists of the 1970s." They can also make difficult interpersonal relationships. Millett wrote some autobiographical memoirs, with what Featherstone calls "brutal honesty," about her, her husband, her lover, and her family. Her relationship with her mother was plagued by her radical politics, her dominating personality, and an unorthodox lifestyle. Helen is very angry about her lesbianism in her books. The family relationship became more tense after he unconsciously committed himself to the psychiatric ward and again when he wrote The Loony Bin Trip .
Millett focuses on her mother at Mother Millett, a book about how she was awakened by her sister, Sally, about the seriousness of Helen Millett's declining health and poor nursing home care. Kate releases her mother from home and returns her to an apartment, where the carer administers her health and comfort. In the book, "Millett writes about the situation - the distance and selfishness of her mother, the failure of her family to recognize the humanity of parents and crazy people - with brutal honesty, but she also describes moments of forgiveness, humility, and admiration." During this time, he developed a close, previously unimaginable, relationship with his mother, whom he regarded as "a miracle and a mercy, a gift." His relationship with his sisters was disrupted during this time, but they all came to support the life of their mother's apartment. Suggestions of her role as a hero at Mother Millett, however, may "sacrifice her two siblings".
Wedding
In 1961, Millett moved to Japan and met fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, a widower of a woman named Yoshiko. A genuine Japanese, Yoshimura studied painting at Tokyo University of the Arts. In 1963, Yoshimura and Millett left Japan and moved to the Lower East Side of New York in the Bowery district. In 1965, the couple married and during their marriage, Millett said that they are "friends and lovers". He dedicated his book Sexual Politics to him. Writer Estelle C. Jelinek says that during their marriage she "loves her, lives her own creative life, and accepts her girlfriend." In 1985, the couple divorced. At the time of his death, Millett married Sophie Keir.
Mental illness
Mental illness affected Millett's personal and professional life since 1973, when he lived with her husband in California and became an activist and teacher at the University of California, Berkeley. Yoshimura and Sally, Kate's eldest sister, became worried about Kate's extreme emotions. His family claims that he went as many as five nights in a row without sleep and can speak unreasonably for hours. During the screening of one of his films at the University of California, Berkeley, Millett "began to speak unclearly". According to his sister Mallory Millett-Danaher, "There is confusion in the confusion of the audience, then people whisper and slowly get up to leave." Sally, who is a law student in Nebraska, signed a letter to have her sister committed. Millett was forcibly taken and held in a psychiatric facility for ten days. He signed himself using a release form aimed at voluntary acceptance. During a visit to St. Paul, Minnesota, a few weeks later, his mother asked Kate to visit a psychiatrist and, on the advice of a psychiatrist, signed a commitment document for Kate. He was released within three days, having won a trial of sanity, due to the efforts of his friends and a pro bono lawyer.
After two unintended confinements, Millett became depressed, especially since it had been restricted without due process. While in a mental hospital, he is given "altered" or suspended medicines, depending on whether he obeys or not. He was stigmatized for being committed and diagnosed with manic depression (now commonly called bipolar disorder). Diagnosis affects how he is perceived by others and his ability to get a job. In California, doctors suggested that she take lithium to manage the widespread mania and depression movements. His depression became more severe when his home in Bowery was cursed and Yoshimura threatened divorce. To manage depression, Millett again started consuming lithium.
In 1980, with the support of two friends and photojournalist Sophie Keir, Millett stopped consuming lithium to improve her mental clarity, relieve diarrhea and hand shakes, and further upheld her philosophy of mental health and treatment. He began to feel alienated and "snappish" when Keir noticed changes in behavior. His behavior is that psychiatric drug abductions, including the "mil-a-minute" speech, which transforms his peaceful artist colony into "quarrelsome dystopia". Mallory Millett, after speaking with Keir, tried to get his commitment but was unsuccessful due to New York's law of unintentional commitment.
Millett visited Ireland in the fall of 1980 as an activist. Upon returning to the United States, there was a delay at the airport and he extended his stay in Ireland. He was unconsciously committed in Ireland after airport security was "determined from someone in New York" that he had a "mental illness" and had stopped consuming lithium. When he was confined, he was deeply sedated. To combat the aggressive pharmacy program "the worst bin," he neutralizes the effects of Thorazine and lithium by eating lots of oranges or hiding pills in his mouth for disposal later. He said about the times when he committed, "To stay sane in the trash is to defy his definition," he said.
[Millett] illustrates with the hatred of the days of television induced boredom, the night of drug-induced terror, people lose their sense of time, personal dignity, even hope. What crime was justified in being locked up like this, Millett asked. How can a person not go crazy in a place like that?
After a few days, she was discovered by her friend Margaretta D'Arcy. With the help of an Irish lawmaker and a psychiatrist from Dublin, Millett was declared competent and released in a few weeks. He returned to the United States, became very depressed, and started taking lithium again. In 1986, Millett stopped consuming lithium without adverse reactions. After a year without lithium, Millett announced the news to shocked families and friends.
Millett's involvement with psychiatry caused him to attempt suicide several times because of damaging physical and emotional effects, but also because of the psychiatric nature of the psychiatric labeling that affects his reputation and threatens his existence in the world. He believed that his depression was due to sadness and broken feelings. He said, "When you have been told that your mind is unhealthy, there is a kind of despair that takes over..." In The Loony Bin Trip, Millett writes that he is afraid of his period of distress:
At one point, listening to other people talking about him "panicked," Millett mused, "How little my own perceptions seem to be," and continued: "Depression is the fear of the victim, not the mania.Because we can enjoy the mania if we are allowed by others around us... A manic who is allowed to think ten thousand miles per minute is happy and harmless and can, if encouraged and given time, may be productive too Ah, but depression - that's what we all hate, we who suffer , while relatives and shrinks... they welcome him: you are silent and you suffer.
Views on mental illness
Millett disputed diagnoses and labels such as manic depression (bipolar disorder) and schizophrenia, which he claims placed on people who exhibit socially unacceptable behavior. "Many healthy people, he says, are 'pushed into mental illness' by public disapproval and by 'authoritarian psychiatric institutions.' He attributes his own depression to his diagnosis, and not the other way around, writes, "When you have been told that your mind is unhealthy, there is a kind of despair that takes over". Millett documented his experience in the book. > The Loony Bin Trip (1990).
Feminist writer and historian Marilyn Yalom writes that "Millett rejected the label that claimed he was crazy", continued "he conveyed a paranoid terror for being cruel judged by others because what seems to be a suffering person to be a sensible act."
Activism
Angered by the institutional psychiatric practice and the voluntary process of voluntary commitment, Millett became an activist. With his lawyer, he changed the law of the State of Minnesota's commitment to a test before someone inadvertently committed.
Millett is active in the anti-psychiatric movement. As a representative of MindFreedom International, he spoke against the psychological torture at the United Nations during the text negotiations of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2005).
In 1978, Millett became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to improve communication between women and link the public with forms of women-based media.
Bowery redevelopment
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Millett was involved in a dispute with the New York City government, who wanted to expel him from his home in Bowery as part of a massive rebuilding plan. Millett and other tenants survived, but eventually lost their battle. Their buildings were destroyed, and the residents were relocated.
Scholarships
Kristan Poirot, author of The Moving-Fighting, Authorization Discourse, says that the release of Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) was an important event in the second wave of the feminist movement. Although there were other important moments in the movement, such as the founding of the National Organization for Women and the release of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, in 1970 the media gave greater attention to the feminist movement. , first with front page articles on The New York Times and coverage on a three-story news program about the Women's Strikes for Equality event that summer. Millett uses psychology, anthropology, sexual revolution, and literary criticism to explain his theory of sexual politics, in which western society has been driven by the belief that men are superior to women. According to Poirot, the book, which received widespread media coverage, "is considered the long exposition of the first book of radical feminist theories of the second wave." Notes published about lesbianism Millett plays a role in fracturing the feminist movement over lesbian role in the movement and reducing its effectiveness as a women's rights activist.
Millett wrote his autobiographical books
Millett noted his visit to Iran and the protests by Iran's feminists against the fundamentalist shift in Iran's politics under the Khomeini administration. His book Going to Iran , with photography by Sophie Keir (1979) is a rare and valuable witness of a series of important developments in the history of the Iranian woman, although it is said from a feminist perspective of the world west.
Camille Paglia scholar describes Millett's scholarship as deeply flawed, stating that "American feminist nose dive began" when Millett achieved excellence. According to Paglia, Millett's Sexual Politics reduces complex artwork to their political content and attacks male artists and writers renowned for their alleged sexism, "thereby sending serious literary appreciation and literary criticism into the eclipse.
Death
Millett died in Paris on September 6, 2017 because of a heart attack, eight days before his 83rd birthday. His partner Sophie Keir was with him at his death.
Awards and honors
Millett won the Best Book Award for Mother Millett from the Library Journal in 2001. In 2012, she was awarded one of the Courage Awards that year for Art by Yoko Ono, created by Ono to "recognize artists, musicians, collectors, curators, writers - those who seek the truth in their work and have the courage to obey it, no matter what "and" respect their work as an expression of my vision of courage ". Between 2011 and 2012, he was also awarded the Lambda Pioneer Award for Literature and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grants for the Artists award (2012). He was honored in the summer of 2011 at the gala Veteran Feminists of America; participants include feminists such as Susan Brownmiller and Gloria Steinem.
In March 2013, the U.S. National Women's Hall of Fame announced that Millett will become one of the pioneer 2013 institutions. Beverly P. Ryder, co-president's board of directors, said that Millett is "a real pillar of the women's movement". The induction ceremony took place on October 24, 2013, at the National Women's Hall of Fame headquarters in Seneca Falls, New York.
Work
Exhibition
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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