After she graduated with an English degree here in 1956, Kate Millett became the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors at St. Hilda's, Oxford, in 1958. Her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University resulted in the book Sexual Politics (1970), a bestseller and one of the first and most important texts of feminism's second wave. Millett looked at literary texts from Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, and D.H. Lawrence, drawing out from their patriarchal view of sex and women to call for political and cultural advancement "toward freedom from rank or prescriptive role, sexual or otherwise."
Professor Emerita Toni McNaron has described Sexual Politics as "wildly popular and influential," continuing: "Everyone who wanted to be taken seriously as a feminist scholar in the 1970s and 1980s read and absorbed that book."Millett landed on the cover of Time magazine, earning both praise and attack (notably by Mailer). Doubleday cited her book as one of the ten most important books it published in the 20th century. Millett went on to publish ten more books. In 2013, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.
As Sexual Politics nears its 45th birthday, the University of Minnesota chose to honor Millett with an honorary doctorate of science. This spring, Millett traveled to Minnesota from her home in upstate New York, where she is the director of the Millett Center for the Arts. On April 21, at an afternoon ceremony at Eastcliff, President Eric Kaler did the honors of "hooding" Millett. Jigna Desai (PhD 1999), now Chair of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (in blue, above), and Regent Patricia Simmons assisted. English chair Ellen Messer-Davidow (below) introduced Millett.
"Along with giants like Friedan, Greer, Daly, deBeauvoir, Lorde, Griffin, Firestone, Brownmiller, and hooks," McNaron concluded, "Millett permanently reshaped the academic and theoretical landscape in North America."
