Katherine Murray Millett was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist.
64 Facts About Kate Millett
2.
Kate Millett attended the University of Oxford and was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
3.
Kate Millett was born and raised in Minnesota, and then spent most of her adult life in Manhattan and the Woman's Art Colony, established in Poughkeepsie, New York, which became the Kate Millett Center for the Arts in 2012.
4.
Kate Millett was married to sculptor Fumio Yoshimura and later, until her death in 2017, she was married to Sophie Keir.
5.
Katherine Murray Kate Millett was born on September 14,1934, to James Albert and Helen Kate Millett in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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Kate Millett was an alcoholic who abandoned the family when she was 14, "consigning them to a life of genteel poverty".
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Kate Millett had two sisters, Sally and Mallory; the latter was one of the subjects of Three Lives.
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Kate Millett was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors having studied at St Hilda's.
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Kate Millett completed her dissertation in September 1969 and was awarded her doctorate, with distinction, in March 1970.
10.
Kate Millett taught English at the University of North Carolina after graduating from Oxford University, but she left mid-semester to study art.
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Kate Millett met fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, had her first one-woman show at Tokyo's Minami Gallery, and taught English at Waseda University.
12.
Kate Millett left Japan in 1963 and moved to New York's Lower East Side.
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Kate Millett taught English and exhibited her works of art at Barnard College beginning in 1964.
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Kate Millett's artwork was featured in an exhibit at Greenwich Village's Judson Gallery.
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Kate Millett started buying and restoring property that year, near Poughkeepsie, New York; this became the Women's Art Colony and Tree Farm, a community of women artists and writers and Christmas tree farm.
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In 1980, Kate Millett was one of the ten invited artists whose work was exhibited in the Great American Lesbian Art Show at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles, although Kate Millett identified as bisexual.
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Kate Millett was a contributor to On the Issues magazine, and continued writing into the early 2000s.
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Kate Millett discussed state-sanctioned torture in The Politics of Cruelty, bringing attention to the use of torture in many countries.
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Kate Millett was involved in the controversy resulting from her appearance on a UK television programme called After Dark.
20.
Kate Millett pushed him away but reportedly later asked for a tape of the show to entertain her friends.
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Kate Millett was involved in prison reform and campaigns against torture.
22.
Kate Millett was a leading figure in the women's movement, or second-wave feminism, of the 1960s and 1970s.
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For example, she and Sidney Abbott, Phyllis Birkby, Alma Routsong, and Artemis March were among the members of CR One, the first lesbian-feminist consciousness-raising group, although Kate Millett identified as bisexual by late 1970.
24.
In 1966, Kate Millett became a committee member of National Organization for Women and subsequently joined the New York Radical Women, Radical lesbians, and Downtown Radical Women organizations.
25.
Kate Millett contributed the piece "Sexual politics " to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan.
26.
Kate Millett was one of the first writers to describe the modern concept of patriarchy as the society-wide subjugation of women.
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Kate Millett wrote several books on women's lives from a feminist perspective.
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Kate Millett is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry.
29.
In 1974 and 1977, respectively, Kate Millett published two autobiographical books.
30.
Kate Millett captured life as she thought, experienced and lived it, in a style like a documentary film.
31.
Kate Millett visited her mother and was disturbed by the care she received and her mother's demoralized attitude.
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Aware of the efforts her mother made to give her life, support her and raise her, Kate Millett became a care-giver and coordinator of many daily therapies, and pushed her mother to be active.
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Kate Millett was not the "polite, middle-class girl" that many parents of her generation and social circle desired; she could be difficult, brutally honest, and tenacious.
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Kate Millett wrote several autobiographical memoirs, with what Featherstone calls "brutal honesty," about herself, her husband, lovers, and family.
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Kate Millett removed her mother from the home and returned her to an apartment, where caregivers managed her health and comfort.
36.
In 1961 Kate Millett moved to Japan and met fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura.
37.
In 1963 Yoshimura and Kate Millett left Japan and moved to New York's Lower East Side in the Bowery district.
38.
In 1965 they married to prevent Yoshimura from being deported, and during their marriage Kate Millett said that they were "friends and lovers".
39.
At the time of her death, Kate Millett had recently married Sophie Keir, her partner for 39 years.
40.
Mental illness affected Kate Millett's personal and professional life from 1973, when she lived with her husband in California and was an activist and teacher at the University of California, Berkeley.
41.
Kate Millett's family claimed that she went for as many as five consecutive nights without sleep and could talk nonsensically for hours.
42.
Kate Millett was forcefully taken and held in psychiatric facilities for ten days.
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Kate Millett signed herself out using a release form intended for voluntary admissions.
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Kate Millett was released within three days, having won a sanity trial, due to the efforts of her friends and a pro bono attorney.
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Kate Millett was stigmatized for having been committed and diagnosed with manic depression.
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Kate Millett's depression became more severe when her housing in the Bowery was condemned and Yoshimura threatened divorce.
47.
In 1980, with support of two friends and photojournalist Sophie Keir, Kate Millett stopped taking lithium to improve her mental clarity, relieve diarrhea and hand tremors, and better uphold her philosophies about mental health and treatment.
48.
Kate Millett began to feel alienated and was "snappish" as Keir watched for behavioral changes.
49.
Kate Millett visited Ireland in the fall of 1980 as an activist.
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Kate Millett was involuntarily committed in Ireland after airport security "determined from someone in New York" that she had a "mental illness" and had stopped taking lithium.
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Kate Millett said of the times when she was committed, "To remain sane in a bin is to defy its definition," she said.
52.
Kate Millett returned to the United States, became severely depressed, and began taking lithium again.
53.
Kate Millett believed that her depression was due to grief and feeling broken.
54.
In 1978, Kate Millett became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.
55.
Kate Millett wrote her autobiographical books Flying and Sita about coming out as gay, partly an important consciousness-raising activity.
56.
Kate Millett realized beginning an open dialogue is important to break down the isolation and alienation that hiding in privacy can cause.
57.
Kate Millett wrote in Flying what Alice Henry calls in her off our backs review of Sita an "excruciating public and political 'coming out'" and its effect on her personal, political, and artistic lives.
58.
Kate Millett recorded her visit to Iran and the demonstrations by Iranian feminists against the fundamentalist shift in Iran politics under Khomeini's government.
59.
Kate Millett's book Going to Iran, with photography by Sophie Keir is "a rare and therefore valuable eyewitness account of a series of important developments in the history of Iranian women", albeit told from the perspective of a feminist from the western world.
60.
Kate Millett died in Paris on September 6,2017, from cardiac arrest, eight days before her 83rd birthday.
61.
Kate Millett won the Best Books Award for Mother Kate Millett from Library Journal in 2001.
62.
Kate Millett was honored in the summer of 2011 at a Veteran Feminists of America gala; attendees included feminists such as Susan Brownmiller and Gloria Steinem.
63.
In March 2013, the US National Women's Hall of Fame announced that Kate Millett was to be among the institution's 2013 inductees.
64.
Beverly P Ryder, board of directors co-president, said that Millett was a "real pillar of the women's movement".