Sexual Politics

Sexual Politics is a book published in 1970 by the American writer and activist Kate Millett, based on the doctoral dissertation she wrote at Columbia University. It is her best-known work and one of the foundational texts of second-wave feminism, particularly of the current known as radical feminism.

Millett's starting point is that sexuality has a political dimension that usually goes unnoticed. She understands politics in a broad sense: any situation in which one group holds power over another. From that definition she argues that military, police, scientific and religious institutions are almost entirely dominated by men, and that this positional power carries over into relations between the sexes. Patriarchy, which she defines as the birthright priority by which males rule females, appears in her account not as a natural or biological order but as a social convention learned from childhood and disguised as romantic love.

The book is organised in three parts. The first sets out these general claims; the second offers a historical account of how sexual relations changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the third is devoted to literary analysis of representative authors. Millett focuses mainly on D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, whom she accuses of treating sexuality in patriarchal and sexist terms: their male protagonists seduce willing women and then humiliate them or subject them to violence. By contrast, she praises Jean Genet for scenes that critically examine these myths of domination. She also discusses Sigmund Freud, George Meredith, John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill.

The book quickly became a classic of feminism and a reference point for academic feminist literary criticism. Its impact was also controversial: Norman Mailer responded with the essay "The Prisoner of Sex" and later with a book of the same title, defending Miller and Lawrence. Its prominence has declined over the years, but it remains an essential reference for understanding feminist thought of the 1970s.