Feminists, conservatives, and members of the popular press credit Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) with catalyzing second-wave feminism, and the author herself has become a self-reflexive cultural icon. Though simultaneously touted as the "Karl Marx of New Feminism" and the "Mao Tse-tung of Women's Liberation" by the mainstream media in the 1970s, Millett had little regard for such notice, resisting the hierarchical role implicit in such designations and theorizing the consequences of her misrepresentation in the media in her next work, the autobiographical memoir Flying (1974). A prolific and self-consciously rigorous writer, Millett remains committed to documenting the ever-shifting relations between the personal and political. In Sita (1977), for instance, she examines an obsessive love affair while examining feminist idealizations of power-free female bonding, and in Going to Iran (1982) she chronicles women-centered activism. Contemporary feminist readers have commented on the rhetorical force and energy of her arguments.

Born 14 September 1934 in St...