Kate Millett
(1934 - living) U.S.A.
Author, feminist
 Born Katherine Murray Millett in St Paul, Minnesota, she graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1956 and then read English at St Hilda College, Oxford, prior to embarking on her PhD at Columbia University.
Her doctoral dissertation for Columbia University (1970) was published as Sexual Politics (1976), a study of the history and nature of the exploitation of women and the relationships between men and women.
Millett was "outed" as a lesbian at a time when the role of lesbians within feminism ws contentious among feminists and lesbians alike, and when gay liberation had a similarly complex status for many women. Her response was the extraordinary autobiographical book Flying (1974), telling of her marriage with a Japanese sculptor and her love affairs with women,
She then wrote another autobiographical work, Sita (1977), describing a mental breakdown and a lesbian romance. The Basement (1979), is an inquiry into an actual case of sadism: the torture and murder of a teenage girl by a woman who served her as a kind of foster mother. Going to Iran (1982) deals with Middle East feminine issues.
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