Sexual Politics

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.

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, "Kate Millett, the Ambivalent Feminist," Salon 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, "Why Kate Millett Still Matters," Bookforum A passionate book by an acute literary analyst. New Yorker Supremely entertaining to read, brilliantly conceived, overwhelming in its arguments, breathtaking in its command of history and literature. New York Times A richly informative book. Washington Post Book World 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

• 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