Kate
The beauty of numbers in a movement for freedom.
Last week, a young man came to the house to talk with me about Kate Millett. He’s doing research on her life and the comet of the women’s movement, streaking across the skies in the 1960s and early 1970s. He asked me what it was like to sit in Millett’s classroom at Barnard College, and there I was, back at a desk in 1965, watching light fill her face as she talked about the avant garde writers who’d given her a life.
Most of them were men, as I recall, men who were changing forms the imagination could move in, reshaping time and space into the fragmented chunks we felt as reality. Changing forms but not content. She assigned us books by Beckett, Genet, Henry Miller, that lot. In those days, you read these books and you sat in movie theaters, your lips parted in the joy of incomprehension, watching the films of Godard, let’s say, because he was reinventing what a movie could be. You sat in reverence without paying attention to the way the girls and women in these movies and books were moved around the boards of these men’s minds with indifference, contempt, boredom, and intermittent lust detached from who the females were and what they might want.
Except you did notice. That was the fissure. You did notice. You always noticed. Every woman noticed, and you didn’t have language for the distance between the voice in your head that narrated your life to you and the figure the world said you were.
Here’s what Kate did. She showed us she was happy to be teaching us. We were the reason she was smiling. Teaching girls was not a consolation prize, not a booby prize. Teaching girls was a great joy and an honor, the smile said.
Do you know what it means to be taken seriously? You probably do, or maybe some of you don’t. By seriously, I mean to feel you are interesting, worth the attention of someone with a mind like Millett’s. Every week, you got to spend an hour with her in private conversation as she went over your writing and explained her comments.
She knew everything, had read everything, had watched every movie, had looked at every piece of art. Everyone needs to be given permission to place their own thoughts at the center of their lives. Make up their own minds about what they love and what they believe is true, tested against their own experience.
In those days, teachers and students could hang out together. If you were a girl, you needed to learn to live a life as much as how to read a book or write a paper. The glamor of Kate. The allure of Kate. She was twelve years older than me. At the beginning I’m nineteen and she’s thirty-one. She is a map.
Everything I write about the past is made up now. I hardly remember anything, really, not because my recall is cloudy. Because living and thinking and feeling, and all the things you need to bring a moment to life, are only possible to gather in the now. I don't think I'm only talking about writing. When I think about my younger self, I think I am happier now than in the past, but I also think I always thought every moment I was up and about and wanting this thing or that thing to happen was a form of happiness.
Kate lived with Fumio, her Japanese husband, who was a sculptor. Kate considered herself a sculptor as well. She considered herself an artist. Academic work and teaching occupied different categories to her. She seemed so dazzling because she knew everything and because of the way she could play with you and your ideas. She was an improv girl—yes, and—and she liked to laugh. I could make her laugh. I think I didn’t know how to be censored. I think I said things out loud Kate wasn’t used to hearing people say out loud. She was a well brought up midwestern girl.
Fumio was a gorgeous human being and a great artist. At the time I was getting to know them, I was married to Bruce. There was love all around. For dinner at their loft, you’d get steak and a baked potato.
When I talked to the young man about Kate, I forgot to warn him about my appearance in the film Women Talking, Rushes One. It was made by Midge McKenzie, who would go on to shoot the documentary series Shoulder to Shoulder, about the British suffrage movement. Even before the publication of Sexual Politics (1970), Kate was getting to know all the feminists in the world there were so far, and she suggested Midge interview me about feminism in the States. What we were doing and what had tripped us into the life.
The life! Oh my god that’s what it was. I could tell you about the phone calls to hustle you to the courthouse in downtown Manhattan to protest abortion hearings going on, hearings where no women were called on to testify. I could tell you about picketing the New York Times to end separate job ads for women and men. We won that, by the way, and the Times stopped its practice. I could tell you about the meetings we sat in and the circles we made on the floors of living rooms, talking about how to come with or without a penis on the job. I could tell you about the furious jostling for power inside the organizations we formed. I could tell you how in 1968 I thought it would always be 1968 because I believed that once a great and incontrovertible idea was launched into the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist would be unable to dislodge it. I was wrong and I was right.
I could tell you about these moments in detail and with joy, but I want to hold you now and tell you about something more intangible. It was the feeling of being part of something that had risen up spontaneously. It had not risen up spontaneously. It had risen up at the crossroads of Yeah, I want to fuck you, too, but I’m sick of making coffee for you and posting your flyers. It had risen up from books written by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan.
The women’s movement clicked into life as a great, laughing monster from an understanding we all suddenly had to share—that we’d been lying all our lives about being happy with not enough. The thing I want to tell you about is the strength this insight gave us because we were numbers. Numbers always count. You can’t do things alone, and you can’t discover that your unhappiness is not a symptom about you. It’s a symptom about everything except you. This is an insight you are never going to lose, and it will give you your life.
In the footage Midge McKenzie shot, I’m smoking. I don’t know how to smoke and I will never learn. I’m smoking the way a chimp smokes, bringing my mouth to the cigarette instead of bringing the cigarette to my mouth. I'm wearing a beret. I have no ability to look unself-conscious. This is still true. I talk about my mother in a way that now, if I saw the clip, I would feel embarrassed by. I’m not tender toward her. Her drifty sense of self is the reason I’m a feminist? Something harsh like that? No one arrives full-blown with irony and compassion. This part of life is unforgivable.
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Such wonderful, engaging stuff. Love reading about the 60’s and 70’s (I was 12 in ‘65). We were hearing about “women’s lib” not long after hearing about “Carnaby Street” and in my tough factory town these things all kind of melded together. So great to learn and unlearn and relive. So glad to be subscribed to to the most interesting surprising and lively Substack out there.!
"I could tell you about these moments in detail and with joy, but I want to hold you now and tell you about something more intangible. It was the feeling of being part of something that had risen up spontaneously. It had not risen up spontaneously. It had risen up at the crossroads of Yeah, I want to fuck you, too, but I’m sick of making coffee for you and posting your flyers. It had risen up from books written by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan."
Ah....this is like a pair of arms wrapping me up and bringing back so many memories. You are my people. I never thought 1968 would end, or if it would end, it would not be pretty. I could never have imagined in my wildest fantasies how far we would fall. But the power in this graph I've pulled lies in its emphasis on the whole idea of numbers. Strength in numbers. We've always known this, of course, but the current moment demands a re-envisioning of what those numbers would look like, what their focus would be, how they would decide to coalesce around a common purpose and aim. The time is absolutely now. What will we create that is new?