Kate Millett

Activist

1934-09-14

Quotes by Kate Millett

It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were ladies— namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedom. The psycho-political tacit here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman's role in what Veblen called —vicarious consumption— was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve... To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman's Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation.
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Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.
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...we touched each other's center, perfectly, just the fingertip upon the clitoris moving more and more slowly, our eyes steady on each other and the delicate pressure fine and more fine until all motion stopped in one still point remembered always, a vision. And then I did not know her pleasure from mine, my body from hers. We fell into and became each other. Then we slipped over the edge, entered and made love.
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The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories —masculine— and —feminine— imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probably that no other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects.
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Hell, I don't want to grow old at all. I never want to die.
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Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.
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It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were ladies— namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedom. The psycho-political tacit here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman's role in what Veblen called —vicarious consumption— was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve... To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman's Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation.
Read quote
The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories —masculine— and —feminine— imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probably that no other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects.
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...we touched each other's center, perfectly, just the fingertip upon the clitoris moving more and more slowly, our eyes steady on each other and the delicate pressure fine and more fine until all motion stopped in one still point remembered always, a vision. And then I did not know her pleasure from mine, my body from hers. We fell into and became each other. Then we slipped over the edge, entered and made love.
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Hell, I don't want to grow old at all. I never want to die.
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We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.
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Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?
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Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.
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A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.
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Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?
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