Kate Millett's tremulous and hauntingly beautiful memoir begins with a telephone call from Minnesota where her mother is dying. Her return home to a severe, intelligent, and controlling matriarch is the catalyst for a meditation on her upbringing in middle America and her subsequent outcast status as a political activist, artist, and lesbian. Mother Millett is an intensely personal journey through the author's interior life, a subject she has visited over the years in such classic texts as Sita and The Loony Bin Trip. In these pages are reflections on a life of political engagement, beginning with the sexual politics of the feminist movement, proceeding to the struggle for gay liberation, and culminating in her campaign for housing rights on the Lower East Side of New York where she and her neighbors currently face eviction. Throughout, Millett confronts her fears of losing her mother, the anchor to a world she has long ago rejected but which continues to define her. Echoing Philip Roth's Patrimony, Millett writes with great poignancy about caring for the person who brought her into the world, a role reversal that brings with it both devastation and grace.

"The crew's anxieties come to a head when they have a wild party down route in Manhattan. The repercussions of that night haunt the journey home until they can be contained no further."--BOOK JACKET.

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A personal story of Kate Millett's struggle to regain control of her life after falling under an ascription of manic depression.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

Many of the well-respected scholarly studies of autobiographical writing have little or nothing to say about mental illness. This book uncovers the mysterious relationship between mood disorders and creativity through the lives of seven writers, demonstrating how mental illness is sometimes the driving force behind creativity.

Presents articles on feminist literature, including significant authors, themes and history.

Documents the key feminists who ignited the second wave women's movement. This work tells the stories of more than two thousand individual women and a few notable men who together reignited the women's movement and made permanent changes to entrenched customs and laws.

Table of contents

Profiles more than 285 men and women who fought for social reform and influenced American history.