Kate Millett, the ambivalent feminist

As intensely as she was lionized, Millett was demonized. In his 1971 essay "The Prisoner of Sex," Norman Mailer, whom in "Sexual Politics" Millett painted as the arch-villain chauvinist, fought back. Spitting mad, he wrote: "Well, it could be said for Kate that she was nothing if not a pug-nosed wit, and that was good, since in literary matters she had not much else." And he called her "the Battling Annie of some new prudery," a "literary Molotov" -- then blasted her purported use of inaccurate research, deceptive quotation and simplistic, flawed logic. How dare she ride roughshod over such artistic geniuses as Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence, and -- although he never comes out and says it -- Norman Mailer?

Millett's public persona started to tarnish. The women's movement turned on her when she was outed as a lesbian. "The disclosure," said an article in Time, "is bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her cause." Indeed it did. The gay movement lashed out at her for not coming out sooner. "Never queer enough for the fanatic," she confessed in "Flying." "Confused with straight people."

"Will future historians say that I blew it?" she asked, always conflicted over the part she was expected to play. Unlike Friedan and Steinem, "all far better politicians," observed Millett, and comfortable in their starring roles as Feminists for the People, Millett wasn't easily defined -- and seemed continually misunderstood. There's Friedan, the stately matriarch; Steinem, the brassy babe; and Millett, the manic-depressive, married, bisexual, women's reformer, gay liberationist, reclusive sculptor, in-your-face activist, retiring Midwesterner, brassy New Yorker. There were too many mixed messages; she was far too conflicted and complicated a figure.

Her private life was in turmoil. Sure she was an iconoclast, but a part of Millett never stopped wanting to be the good little Catholic girl. She was tormented by the pain her lesbian front-page news brought her deeply religious mother. "Guilt," wrote Millett, "her retaliation beyond any offense." In the self-described "isolation" that fame had brought, she was increasingly tortured by her manic-depression -- which may well explain Millett's many selves, at war with one another as much as they were with the outside world.

"There is no denying the misery and stress of life," she wrote in "The Loony-Bin Trip." "The swarms of fears, the blocks to confidence, the crises of decision and choice." This is her dark self, the one diagnosed as "constitutionally psychotic," who, against her will, is given electroshock treatments. This is not the self-possessed mother of the feminist movement, this is the other woman who, Millett admits, is constantly wavering -- "I doubt everything," she says.

The feeding frenzy became too much for her. "How does one get out of the movement?" she asked. "Where is the exit? ... I can't be Kate Millett any more ... A joke at cocktail parties ... Just let me watch it from the sidelines. Like other women can. Enjoy the luxury of looking on while someone else does it for us." Be careful of what you wish for. Over the next three decades, she slipped into obscurity. Millett stopped being Kate Millett, America's favorite feminist.

The reality is that Kate Millett has continued doing what she had always done: writing, art and activism. In 1973, she published "The Prostitution Papers," a defense of prostitutes' rights; the following year, she came out with "Flying"; and in 1977, "Sita," about an ill-fated love affair with another woman. In 1979, Millett went to Iran to work for women's rights, was soon expelled, and wrote about the experience in "Going to Iran." "The Politics of Cruelty," published in 1994 -- which brought her more attention than any book since "Sexual Politics" -- exposed the ongoing use of state-sanctioned torture in dozens of countries. Some of her books get attention; many fall off the charts. Universities and small galleries occasionally exhibit her work, and colleges ask her to lecture, although less and less often. And she's managed to hold onto her farm, today a well-established artists' colony.

A year ago, Millett surfaced in the most disconcerting manner, when an article she wrote for the London Guardian was excerpted and circulated on the Internet. In the article, titled "The Feminist Time Forgot," Millett comes across as desperate and destitute, fearful of future "bag-lady horrors." Despite her credentials, she can't get a decent teaching job, not even at an extension night school. No one returns her calls. She can't even get hired as a temp. "I don't type well enough," Millett writes ruefully. She's offered $1,000 to republish "Sexual Politics," an embarrassing sum she refuses. (Ironically, notes Millett, Doubleday is putting out an anthology of the 10 most important books it's published in the past century -- an excerpt from "Sexual Politics" is included.) Most astonishing is the news that she earns a living selling Christmas trees from her farm. "I begin to wonder what is wrong with me," she writes. "Am I 'too far out' or too old? Is it age? I'm 63. Or am I 'old hat' in the view of the 'new feminist scholarship'?"

Camille Paglia, author of "Sexual Personae," a title that mimics Millett's own, all but screams yes. Writing in her Salon column of Millett's "atrocious book," Paglia blames Millett for starting "the repressive, Stalinist style in feminist criticism ... Her condescending, destructive, bitterly anti-male method of approaching art was adopted as dogma by the women's studies programs as they sprang up everywhere in the 1970s and became insular fiefdoms intolerant of dissent."

Is this to be Millett's epitaph -- a bitter, misguided feminist? She may no longer be on our bookshelves, but Millet is still very much present. A little more than a month ago, she made the news over the Bowery building where she's lived for 40 years; she's fighting to save it from the wrecking ball. The New York Times ran an op-ed piece -- "The Bowery Held Hostage" -- lambasting Millett, "an icon in feminism's radical circles," for single-handedly impeding the progress of the glitzy urban development.

I reach Millett at New York's NoHo Gallery, where she's showing a series of drawings. The exhibit, "Elegy for a Murdered Lady," is devoted to her Aunt Margaret, who died in a nursing home, even though Millett fought family members unsuccessfully to get her out. When I call, Millett is redirecting a delivery man who's convinced that she ordered a stack of tortillas. The story of her life: Millett is misunderstood. "Sir," she says in an amicable, deep and slightly scratchy voice -- it sounds like a smoker's voice -- "I think you might try upstairs."

The tortilla matter cleared up, no, she tells me, she hasn't read what Paglia has said about her. "It's not my style to make that kind of remark about people," she says in genteel St. Paulese. "Maybe she thinks I'm too radical?" Millett asks in seemingly genuine bewilderment. And the New York Times piece, "That was a misunderstanding. I found out the op-ed piece had been commissioned." Contrary to what the Times said, she is not battling Councilwoman Kathryn E. Freed over the property. "We get along quite well." The Bowery building is an important cause of hers, says Millett; the historic building was once New York's worst brothel, so bad for the women that they regularly committed suicide. "Imagine when you've written about prostitutes and you end up living in a building where prostitutes took their lives."

Millett explains she also didn't know her article was on the Internet and appears chagrined that the piece came across as self-pitying. "It turned out to be embarrassing, really," she says. "They took what was newsworthy. What I wrote was longer and funnier." In fact, she tells me, the essay was meant as a diatribe against the oppressive university adjunct system that pays professors paupers wages, not a tract on how Kate Millett has fallen on hard times. Once again, Millett's meaning has been lost in the medium. If only, if only people could understand.

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