‘The Silent Art’

Kate Millett would never be more active or more in demand than she was in 1972. Two summers earlier, her debut book had made her a household name. Begun as her thesis for a literature Ph.D., Sexual Politics swelled into a wide-ranging examination of sex as a terrain of political contest and patriarchy as a ubiquitous force, adaptable but tenacious throughout history, structuring interpersonal life at every scale. The press seized on the book as an exemplary artifact of a new wave of feminism striking the shores of the mainstream.After Time put her portrait on its cover and dubbed her “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation,” Millett struggled to wrench the spotlight back toward the causes she’d been made to represent. She spoke at rallies, college auditoriums, and closed-door rap sessions. She appeared on Dick Cavett and on the steps of the New York capitol. In March 1972 she returned to Columbia, where she’d been a graduate student, to protest layoffs of custodial staff; in May she traveled to California to witness the trial of Angela Davis. And in April she mounted an art show called Terminal Piece.Millett had been making art for over a decade, a parallel vocation that was met wi...