Word: millette
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...Cover: Portrait in oil of Kate Millett by Alice Neel...
...since its beginnings more than a century ago. Until this year, however, with the publication of a remarkable book called Sexual Politics, the movement had no coherent theory to buttress its intuitive passions, no ideologue to provide chapter and verse for its assault on patriarchy. Kate Millett, 35, a sometime sculptor and longtime brilliant misfit in a man's world, has filled the role through Sexual Politics. "Reading the book is like sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker," says George Stade, assistant professor of English at Columbia University. He should know; the book was Kate's Ph.D. thesis...
...book has made Millett the Mao Tse-tung of Women's Liberation. That is the sort of description she and her sisters despise, for the movement rejects the notion of leaders and heroines as creations of the media?and mimicry of the ways that men use to organize their world. Despite the fact that it is essentially a polemic suspended awkwardly in academic traction, Sexual Politics so far has sold more than 15,000 copies and is in its fourth printing...
...that questions nearly all established institutions and many traditional values. The prospect of the hand that rocks the cradle also rocking the boat can be frightening. But it is also freighted, as the best of the radicals insist, with a potential for enormous good for both sexes. As Kate Millett says: "We really don't have many fatuous hopes of taking over. We would like, very much, a fair shake. We are each half of a person, we are each less than we could be. If we did not have these rigid sexual roles, we would all have so much...
...book, Millett defines politics as the "power-structured relationships" by which one group?in this case the male elite?governs others. Patriarchy is thus limned as the institutional foe. Labeling it as the "most pervasive ideology of our culture," she argues that it provides our "fundamental concept of power." Women are helpless, in other words, because men control the basic mechanisms of society. Her solution is drastic: demolish the patriarchal system. Until this is done, women and men as well will "remain imprisoned in the vast gray stockades of sexual reaction. There is no way out but to rebel...