Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Sexual Economics" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 228-230). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Winter 1979
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
We’re having dinner at her hotel and rushing the conversation because she’s speaking on campus that night.
She loves to talk and question and ponder over people arid ideas. She is suffused with the Iranian revolution and grateful for her opportunity to play a role in it. She is at one with the tens of thousands of women who are defying the medieval misogyny of the mullahs. She loathes the Shah and her comments on the Rockefellers are duly scatological.
This is one tough woman, resonating with quiet energy and purpose. This is Kate Millett, and she can be steely. But she also comes across as gentle and softspoken, with a finely-tuned sensibility more reminiscent of a Southern lady than the embattled lesbian feminist, exploited artist and maligned radical that she is.
On campus, an overflow audience cranes to hear her views on "International Feminism." She speaks with a unique intelligence, wit, tenderness and simplicity. Women, she announces, are the advance troops of the Iranian revolution because they came out in full force against the Shah and are in the forefront of the battle against Khomeini, who is "the worst thing to happen since the Shah."
She has as little use for national chauvinism as for the sexual kind. "They told me I had no right to interfere in another country," she says. "Do they think my allegiance belongs to the white male ruling class of the U.S.? This country of imperialism and brutality is not what I identify with. My people are the women and the oppressed of the world."
A woman criticizes her for failure to present a working-class analysis and anti-capitalist program. Millett, startled, nods at the speaker’s points. "I agree with you," she says. "I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear." A second floor speaker furiously disputes the first one: "That’s how women always get forgotten — we’re shoved into second place after the workers!" Millett says mildly, "We needn’t be. I am a socialist."
After the meeting, we take her to nearby Freeway Hall to see a real working-class and feminist headquarters. She seems pleased when Marcel, our in-house graphics genius, gifts her with one of his beautiful posters of an Iranian woman rebel.
Then we all drive to my house, where cedar logs are burning in the fireplace and refreshments are at hand. We talk about Tehran, New York City, and the flight to reformism of most feminist superstars of the ’70s — and this brings us inevitably, materialists that we are, to what women always end up discussing: the bitter struggle for money.
Kate Millett is a Ph.D., a best-selling and prolific writer, a painter and sculptor, a political activist and world figure. And she is almost broke. Finding publishers is a degrading and almost impossible task, her books are not reprinted even though they sell well, her author’s share of sales is miniscule, and her (surprisingly) few speaking appearances are usually low paid.
Women writers and lecturers suffer an extreme form of economic sexism, particularly when they are social rebels. Millett tries to turn her tree farm into a modestly profitable enterprise, and to that end she labors mightily with hand, sinew and muscle while the literature and visual art and the political organizing she excels at go uncreated. What has to lie fallow is her mind and her talent.
In Iran she was arrested and subjected to the terror of armed men representing the bourgeois state. "Powerless individuals shouldn’t be treated like that," she says. "It just isn’t fair." And neither is it fair for a Kate Millett to be underpaid and politically prevented from reaching the marketplace for her wares.
She is a pacifist; I am not. (We argued heatedly about this.) She underplays her socialism; I do not. But she is one of the bravest and most principled figures to emerge from the huge wave of radical feminism, and if the women’s movement doesn’t bestir itself to help shield its few real leaders from the capitalist double-cross against women’s earnings, that movement will behead itself.
It was four in the morning when I deposited Millett back at the hotel, and we were still wide awake. A hard look at the economics of being female will do that to you every time.