Sexual Politics

by Kate Millett, Catharine MacKinnon (Foreword by), Rebecca Mead (Afterword)

Overview

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231174251
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	02/16/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	450,613
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Catharine A. MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at Michigan Law School and the long-term James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of My Life in Middlemarch and One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Catharine A. MacKinnon
Introduction to the Illinois Paperback
Introduction to the Touchstone Paperback
Preface
Part I. Sexual Politics
1. Instances of Sexual Politics
2. Theory of Sexual Politics
Part II. Historical Background
3. The Sexual Revolution, First Phase: 1830–1930
4. The Counterrevolution: 1930–60
Part III. The Literary Reflection
5. D. H. Lawrence
6. Henry Miller
7. Norman Mailer
8. Jean Genet
Postscript
Afterword, by Rebecca Mead
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

A well documented intellectual masterpiece.

Pittsburgh Press

[Millett] translates the war of the sexes from the language of nineteenth century bedroom farce into the raw images of guerilla warfare.... Even more than a political system, our sexual order is a 'habit of mind and a way of life.' Millett's book may go far toward subverting it.

Time

A passionate book by an acute literary analyst.

New Yorker

A richly informative book.

Washington Post Book World

[Millett] translates the war of the sexes from the language of nineteenth century bedroom farce into the raw images of guerilla warfare.... Even more than a political system, our sexual order is a 'habit of mind and a way of life.' Millett's book may go far toward subverting it.

Time

A passionate book by an acute literary analyst.

New Yorker

"This is a book that analyzes revolution in order to serve revolution...The book's humor is part of its warmth and tenderness, and in striking contrast, I thought, to the chill humorlessness of those other two great feminists, Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing." Books of the Century, The New York Times, September, 1970

Barbara Hardy

Millett's classic woke me up, changed my perception of women and myself, as it did for tens of thousands of American women when it first appeared.

Leslie Crawford

Sexual Politics dissected the beliefs, the cultural language, that supported sexual hierarchy. Millett's arguments cut through contemporary culture almost as surely as they did when written. In fact, it seems looking back to this old radicalism would help today's feminists to move forward.

Katie Ryder

Supremely entertaining to read, brilliantly conceived, overwhelming in its arguments, breathtaking in its command of history and literature.

New York Times