I tore through Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics over a weekend in 1973. At the time I was in my second year at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, studying English, which was in many respects a deeply conservative course. But after a friend lent me the book, it was as if an explosion had gone off in my head.
My politics had always been of the left, but I’d never really encountered a feminist perspective before. Sexual Politics allowed me – it forced me – to look at the world in a different way.
I was on fire with what I had read. I couldn’t stop talking about it. I went into my tutorial the next week and launched into a 10-minute rhapsody about the book and how it had transformed the way I looked at the canon. My tutor, Anne Elliott, a distinguished middle-class English Christian who specialised in The Faerie Queene, listened patiently, then said:“Ah yes, dear Kate. I supervised the thesis that became Sexual Politics.” It was as if Margaret Thatcher had claimed responsibility for Simone de Beauvoir.
That didn’t take the wind out of my sails; if anything, it made me more confident in the power of what I had found. If she could convince Anne Elliott, I thought, clearly this Millett woman spoke from solid ground.
Thanks to Kate Millett, I became a feminist. I met other women who espoused similar ideas and it led me to a place where I also came to understand my own sexuality.
Years later, I met Kate Millett at a St Hilda’s Gaudy weekend. She was gracious and good-humoured in the face of my tongue-tied fangirldom. I know she had her struggles with depression and physical ill-health over the years, but I hope she truly understood how very important she was to so many of us.
