Artist Alice Neel. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine. Photo credit - WWP team.

An American feminist, writer, artist, activist, and educator who played a leading role in the second wave of the women's liberation movement.

Katherine Millett was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She grew up with an alcoholic and abusive father, who left the family to live in poverty when she was 14. She was educated at parochial schools and later studied English literature at the University of Minnesota, graduating magna cum laude in 1956.

Supported by her wealthy aunt, she furthered her education by studying at St Hilda’s College, one of the colleges of the University of Oxford in England, becoming the first woman to receive a first-class honors degree from the institute. She taught English briefly at the University of North Carolina before moving to New York City to pursue a career as an artist, supporting herself by working as a kindergarten teacher in Harlem.

In 1961, at 27, Millett moved to Tokyo to study sculpture and held her first solo exhibition there. After two years, Millett returned to the US and taught English and Philosophy at Barnard College while creating art. At the time, she became involved with various women’s organizations, serving as a National Organization for Women committee member and joining the New York Radical Women and Radical Lesbians.

In 1970, She began her writing career by contributing pieces to the anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. That same year, she published her Ph.D. dissertation as a book titled Sexual Politics. In this groundbreaking work, Millett used sociology and anthropology tools to define the goals and strategies of the women’s liberation movement. Although it cost her the teaching position in Bernard, the book became the movement’s manifesto, making her a prominent figure and the voice of the second wave of feminism in the US. The following year, Millett founded the self-supporting women’s artist colony, Women’s Art Colony and Tree Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, later renamed the Millett Center for the Arts.

In her second book, The Prostitution Papers (1971), Millett discussed the inherent relationship between prostitution and patriarchy and compared it to marriage contracts. Her following two books, published in 1974 and 1977, were autobiographies in which she explored her sexuality and role as a public figure.

In the following decades, Millett continued to write and explore various aspects of feminism through writing and art. Throughout her life, she published ten books and exhibited her artwork in dozens of venues worldwide.

She died of cardiac arrest several days before her 83rd birthday.

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“Whatever the “real” differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike.”

Fun Facts

She identified as bisexual.
She was married twice – first to Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura and later to artist Sophie Keir.
In 1971, she produced the film Three Lives, in which three women talked candidly about their female experiences.
In 1979, she traveled to Iran for the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom to work for Iranian women's rights. There, she witnessed Ayatollah Khomeini's government implement new oppressive rules against women, such as not allowing women to divorce their husbands and preventing girls from attending school with boys. She detailed her experiences in the book Going to Iran.
In 1980, she was one of ten artists to exhibit their work in the Great American Lesbian Art Show at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.
She was a frequent contributor to On the Issues magazine.
She campaigned against state-sanctioned torture, discussing the subject in her 1994 book The Politics of Cruelty.
She had been committed to mental health institutions on various occasions, leading her to join the anti-psychiatry movement and write about it in her 1990 book The Loony-Bin Trip.
She was featured and participated in numerous movies, including the feminist history film: She's Beautiful When She's Angry and Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography.