Published in 2000 (first published 1969)
424 pages
Kate Millett is an American feminist writer, artist, and activist. Her most recent books are Mother Millett, A.D.: A Memoir, and The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment. She is director of the Millett Center for the Arts and lives in New York City and upstate New York.
What is this book about?
Identifying patriarchy as a socially conditioned belief system masquerading as nature, the author demonstrates how its attitudes and systems penetrate literature, philosophy, psychology, and politics. Her work rocked the foundations of the literary canon by castigating time-honored classics for their use of sex to degrade women.
Praised and denounced when it was first published in 1970, Sexual Politics not only explored history but also became part of it. Kate Millett’s groundbreaking book fueled feminism’s second wave, giving voice to the anger of a generation while documenting the inequities – neatly packaged in revered works of literature and art – of a complacent and unrepentant society. Sexual Politics laid the foundation for subsequent feminist scholarship by showing how cultural discourse reflects a systematized subjugation and exploitation of women. Identifying patriarchy as a socially conditioned belief system masquerading as nature, Millett demonstrates in detail how its attitudes and systems penetrate literature, philosophy, psychology, and politics. Her incendiary work rocked the foundations of the literary canon by castigating time-honored classics – from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead – for their use of sex to degrade and undermine women. A new introduction to this edition draws attention to some of the forms patriarchy has taken recently in consolidating its oppressive and dangerous control.
