But Woolf was a more traditional reader, if also a subtler and more brilliant one, and not quite so single-mindedly focused on sex. Millett was preceded by a great many other “lady critics,” as they were then infuriatingly called, the most estimable being, of course, Virginia Woolf. You may not agree that literature is the proper medium for consciousness-raising, but you can’t deny that Millett made reading a life-changing, even world-changing, act. You could go to novels and poems for an education in sex as power. Lawrence-introduced a new and remarkably durable idea: you could interpret literature in light of its gender dynamics. Her urgent, elegant 1970 masterwork, Sexual Politics, with its wry takedowns of the casual misogyny and rape scenes that had made the reputations of the sexual revolutionaries du jour-Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, D.H. Let me state it plainly: Millett invented feminist literary criticism. Maybe Second Wave feminism now seems so far away that we’re hazy about what once made it so thrilling and threatening. When Kate Millett died, half-forgotten, on September 6 at the age of eighty-two, obituary writers struggled to take the full measure of this pioneering feminist writer and activist. Kate Millett with one of her sculptures at her studio at 295 Bowery, New York City, July 7, 1967
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