06/03/2026
Kate Millet wrote Sexual Politics. Do you know HERstory?
She wrote the book that changed how the world understood power between men and women. Three years later, her own family had her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution.
They didn't debate her ideas.
They questioned her sanity.
In 1970, a 36-year-old woman from Minnesota published a book that stopped the world. It was called Sexual Politics. Within a year, 80,000 people had bought it. The New York Times called it "the Bible of Women's Liberation." Kate Millett appeared on the cover of Time magazine. At the University of Texas, students gave her three standing ovations before she even spoke.
The book did something no one had done quite so clearly before. It argued that the relationship between men and women wasn't natural or biological — it was a carefully constructed system of power. And that system had been hiding in plain sight inside the novels, philosophies, and cultural stories we called "great."
Kate showed how oppression gets dressed up as romance. How control gets sold as protection. How a cage, if decorated beautifully enough, stops looking like a cage at all.
The world celebrated her.
Then it tried to silence her.
Three years after her book changed feminist theory forever, Kate was teaching at UC Berkeley and working as an activist. Her husband and her sister grew concerned — not about anything she had done, but about the intensity of her emotions. Her passion. Her refusal to quiet down.
They had her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution.
A doctor diagnosed her with manic depression. She was given lithium.
Kate fought back through the courts and won her freedom. She and her attorney even changed Minnesota's commitment laws — requiring a trial before anyone could be locked away against their will.
But something had shifted. She would spend the next seven years on lithium. The medication blurred her thinking. Made her hands shake. Filled her days with a grey fog that made writing — her life's work, her deepest self — feel almost impossible.
In 1980, she stopped taking it.
When her family found out, they arrived at her door with a doctor and two ambulances.
They wanted to commit her again.
Kate had to fight the urge to cry. Because crying would be used as evidence. Emotion, for a woman who had challenged power, had become a weapon turned against her.
She escaped commitment that time.
Later that year, she traveled to Ireland to support political prisoners on hunger strike — a cause she believed in deeply. She was involuntarily committed there too, in a psychiatric hospital, confined against her will, sedated, stripped of her freedom.
She wrote about it all in her 1990 memoir, The Loony-Bin Trip.
What Kate Millett understood — and what she spent the rest of her life saying out loud — was this:
There is a very old and very effective way to dismiss a woman who challenges authority. You don't debate her ideas. You question her stability. You don't engage with her argument. You redirect attention to her tone, her emotions, her mental health.
Her clarity becomes "instability." Her anger becomes "a symptom." Her persistence becomes "proof she needs help."
And once a woman is labeled unstable, a quiet but devastating thing happens — nothing she says can be fully trusted anymore. Her critique of the system gets filed under her illness. Her resistance becomes her diagnosis.
Kate never fully accepted the bipolar label. She believed the institutionalization itself had caused her suffering — not the other way around. She spent her final decades fighting for patients' rights and against forced psychiatric hospitalization.
She married her partner of 39 years, Sophie Keir, shortly before she died.
Kate Millett passed away on September 6, 2017. She was 82 years old.
Sexual Politics still sits on syllabi around the world. The Loony-Bin Trip still asks a question no one has fully answered:
What do we do when the tools used to help people are also used to control them?
What do we do when passion is pathologized, and the loudest voices are the first ones medicated into silence?
Kate Millett didn't stop asking.
She wrote one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Then she spent decades fighting for the right to exist as the person who wrote it — loudly, emotionally, stubbornly, on her own terms.
Neither should we stop asking.
Because the question she left behind is still exactly as sharp as the day she first put it into words.
