She was part of “second wave feminism” when there were only 15 of them in New York. Millett married Fumio Yoshimura, a Japanese sculptor, lived a short while in Japan, then returned to the US, and New York, where she became involved in bohemia, the art world and crucially radical and feminist politics. Photograph: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Kate Millett, the author of Sexual Politics (1970), at her home in New York in 1999. She was arrested at Shannon Airport and chucked into the local asylum from where she was miraculously rescued by feminist June Levine and psychiatrist Ivor Browne A brilliant scholar, Millett completed a degree in the US then, supported by an aunt, got into Oxford and was the first American woman to graduate with first class honours though later she said the most important thing she did at Oxford was read, and absorb, Simone de Beauvoir’s stomping masterpiece, The Second Sex. The daughter of Irish-American parents, her father an alcoholic who beat his wife and kids and then abandoned them when Kate was 14, her mum was an early feminist, who worked and supported the family. And, as one of her thousands of friends posted on Twitter, “she died in the saddle, about to attend a Simone de Beauvoir conference”. She was 83 and died of a heart attack in Paris on Wednesday, one of her favourite cities, her partner of many years by her side. Kate Millett, one of the great founding mothers of the feminist revolution is dead.
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