Kate Millett

Marriage and the family was the foundational patriarchal source, according to Firestone, of oppression.

Kate Millett's book, Sexual Politics, argued that patriarchal power operated through intimate relationships.

And so it encouraged generations of activists to interpret marriage through categories of domination.

A woman enters marriage and is immediately dominated.

Manliness was what women wanted, and they wanted to take it away from the men.

Radical feminists like Kate Millett in the 70s officially introduced patriarchy into mainstream feminist theory to attack male supremacy.

Slogans at rallies began targeting the patriarchal systems, and by the riot girls of the 90s, everything was smash the patriarchy.

Feminist bell hooks claimed that, quote, patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.

Love is in itself, oppressive.

Here's another one by Kate Millett, where she literally says that the concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation, which the male is free to exploit.

So this whole idea of a loving relationship is in itself exploitative.

It is the man exploiting the woman.

Um, as Showalter points out, the first phase of modern feminist criticism, uh, was the kind of, the kind of work that primarily pays attention to men's treatment of women in fiction.

Uh, uh, Mary Ellman's, uh, Mary Ellman's book of, of, uh, of, of 1968 called Thinking About Women, Kate Millett's, uh, Sexual Politics, uh, in 1970 are both books which, um, um, which, uh, focus primarily on sexist male novelists, uh, who, uh, whose demeaning treatment of women, uh, is something that, that the feminist perspectives- perspective needed to bring out.

Um, this criticism is superseded in, uh, Elaine Showalter's account by what she calls and prefers, uh, gynocriticism or the gynocritics.

Uh, and gynocriticism is not so much concerned with men's treatment of women in fiction as with the place of women, uh, as writers in literary history and as characters, uh, regardless whether they're characters in men's or

And I, if you, you know, think about that alongside Dworkin and Dworkin's Intercourse, right? Dworkin wasn't criticizing, what, a bad form of sexuality.

She was, like MacKinnon, they were criticizing sexuality as such, and maybe like Kate Millett, right? Like the whole, the, that, that whole thing.

Um, and I think that, yeah, what would that...

They would've said, what, those things are on a continuum, not, not opposites.

I mean, I think w- when she speaks about racial justice and so on, I think this speaks to a central c- conflict in the movement that Phyllis Chesler really litigates in her book about what to do about left-wing men.

Um, are we, are we part of a kind of broader sort of civil rights, quote unquote, "movement" that include, um, racialized men, um, or are we not? And that seemed to be sort of a, a central conflict at the time.

Um, I know that there was a fallout, uh, about women, um, Kate Millett supporting Irish liberation stuff that involved men that were accused of being violent.

There was also in the UK Michael X, who was our take on Malcolm X, who was an exceptionally violent man, um, who g- got some support for some radical feminists, and this caused a split.

Yeah.

Kate Millett, in her landmark 1970 book, Sexual Politics, really went after Miller.

She tore him apart.

Critics align with her in pointing out that the book is inherently patriarchal and demeaning.

We devoured Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci, as well as the writings of contemporary revolutionaries such as Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver.

Before long, there was Kate Millett and Germaine Greer.

I soon embarked on a new life's journey, one that before long saw me spend a year in the library that made me, Sydney's Mitchell Library.

Today, that entire library is in the much larger Mitchell Library Reading Room, expanded so many more people can use it in the State Library of New South Wales complex.

Despite numerous inaccuracies and logical fallacies, Beauvoir's assertions about the social construction of sex differences and woman's otherness have had a profoundly deforming impact on all subsequent feminist theorizing.

I'm Janice Fiamingo, and this is the Fiamingo File 2.0. Simone de Beauvoir's magnum opus, The Second Sex, published in French in 1949 and clocking in at over 750 pages, has been cited as a major influence by key American feminist writers Betty Friedan and Kate Millett.

First translated into English in 1953, the work is credited with establishing the much-employed distinction now causing grief to anti-trans feminists between biological sex and what came to be called gender identity.

Beauvoir's assertion at the beginning of the book's second volume that one is not born, but rather becomes woman, is considered the most famous feminist sentence ever written and has been applauded by queer theorist Judith Butler for establishing femininity as a process of becoming, a performance guided by a cultural script rather than a biological given.