Sexual Politics

When Kate Millett’s doctoral dissertation was published in 1970, it exploded like a bomb in the cultural landscape. Sexual Politics was not merely a book; it was an intellectual event that provided second-wave feminism with its theoretical armature, forever changing how we understand the relationship between gender and power. Millett’s central, revolutionary thesis is deceptively simple yet profoundly subversive: sex is political. The relationship between men and women is not a private affair governed by nature or personal affection; it is a power relationship, a political institution every bit as structured and consequential as the state itself. She called this institution “patriarchy.”

Millett defines patriarchy not as the rule of kind fathers, but as a pervasive system of male dominance that operates through ideology, sociology, biology, class, economics, education, myth, and psychology. Unlike earlier analyses that focused on specific grievances like suffrage or property rights, Millett aimed for the roots. She argued that patriarchy is the most fundamental and pervasive form of political domination in human history, predating and underlying all other forms of oppression, including class and race. It constructs “sex” itself as a category of political significance, assigning roles of “masculine” dominance and “feminine” submission that are then falsely naturalized as biological destiny. The personal—the bedroom, the family, romantic love—is revealed not as a refuge from the political, but as its primary site of enforcement.

The book is also a landmark of feminist literary criticism. In the second half, Millett performs devastating close readings of four literary giants: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. She exposes the misogyny embedded in the celebrated works of these male authors, showing how their supposedly “liberating” sexual prose is, in fact, a celebration of male violence and female degradation. Lawrence is revealed as a preacher of phallic worship and female submission; Miller’s bawdy humor is shown to mask a contempt for women that borders on the eliminationist. By subjecting these canonical figures to feminist interrogation, Millett challenged the supposed objectivity and universality of the male literary tradition, demonstrating how “great literature” could function as propaganda for patriarchy.

Millett’s analysis extends beyond literature to the realm of political theory, particularly through a sharp critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and its role in enforcing gender conformity. She dismantles the “anatomy is destiny” argument, showing how Freud’s theories of female “penis envy” and “natural” passivity were not scientific facts but ideological constructs designed to pathologize female autonomy and justify women’s subordination. This critique paved the way for subsequent feminist work on the social construction of gender.

Sexual Politics also contains a crucial historical analysis, recovering the history of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century women’s movements and documenting what Millett calls the “counterrevolution”—the backlash against feminism that occurred after women won suffrage, a backlash that intensified through the mid-twentieth century and sought to push women back into the domestic sphere. This historical lens reminds readers that progress is not linear and that patriarchy is a dynamic, adaptive system that constantly reinvents its strategies of containment.

Despite its status as a classic, Sexual Politics has faced critiques. Some argue that its analysis of patriarchy is too monolithic, failing to account for the differences in how women of different races, classes, and cultures experience male domination. Later intersectional feminists would build on and correct this framework. Nevertheless, Millett’s work remains foundational. It gave a generation of feminists the language to articulate what they felt, transforming inchoate rage into a coherent political program. The phrase “the personal is political,” which became the rallying cry of second-wave feminism, finds its most rigorous elaboration in this text. Sexual Politics remains essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand how power operates through the most intimate corners of our lives, and why dismantling patriarchy is not a cultural preference but a political imperative.