Kate Millet update (fwd)

[Martha Gimenez <gimenez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1998 11:55:55 -0400 (EDT)
From: Joanne Naiman <jnaiman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Kate Millet update (fwd)

This depressing message came my way today.
Joanne Naiman

---------- Forwarded message ----------

>
>                          The feminist time forgot
>
>       In 1970, Kate Millett wrote Sexual Politics, a groundbreaking,
>   bestselling analysis of female oppression. And what is she doing now?
>                             Read her and weep
>
>  The Guardian (London)     Tuesday June 23, 1998
>
>    Another season at the farm, not that bad, but not that good either:
>       the tedium of a small community, shearing trees, so exhausted
>     afterward that I did nothing but read. A season without writing or
>   silk screening or drawing. Back to the Bowery and another emptiness. I
>    cannot spend the whole day reading, so I write, or try to. A pure if
>    pointless exercise. My books are out of print, even Sexual Politics,
>        and the manuscript about my mother cannot find a publisher.
>
>    Trying also to get a job. At first the academic voices were kind and
>      welcoming, imagining I am rich and am doing this for amusement,
>     slightly embarrassed as they offer the new slave wages. I hear the
>   guilty little catch in the administrative voice, forced maybe to make
>   a big concession of $3,000 in my case. But I couldn't live on that, I
>        demur. "Of course, no one does," they chuckle from their own
>        $50-80,000 "positions". A real faculty appointment seems an
>     impossibility, in my case as in so many others now. I have friends
>     with doctorates earning as little as $12,000 a year, eking out an
>   existence at five different schools, their lives lived in cars and on
>    the economic edge. I'm too old for that and must do better. "Oh, but
>   our budget," they moan, "we really have no funds at all, much as we'd
>   love to have you." "Surely I'm qualified?" I ask, not as a "celebrity"
>    but as a credentialed scholar with years of teaching and a doctorate
>      with distinction from Columbia, an Oxford First, eight published
>                       books. They'll get back to me.
>
>                             But they never do.
>
>     I begin to wonder what is wrong with me. Am I "too far out" or too
>     old? Is it age? I'm 63. Or am I "old hat" in the view of the "new
>   feminist scholarship"? Or is it something worse? Have I been denounced
>    or bad-mouthed? By whom? What is the matter with me, for God's sake?
>    Has my feminism made me "abrasive"? Surely my polite, St Paul manner
>      should be reassuring. God knows I'm deferential enough to these
>                                  people.
>
>                   I begin to realise there isn't a job.
>
>      I cannot get employment. I cannot earn money. Except by selling
>     Christmas trees, one by one, in the cold in Poughkeepsie. I cannot
>    teach and have nothing but farming now. And when physically I can no
>   longer farm, what then? Nothing I write now has any prospect of seeing
>   print. I have no saleable skill, for all my supposed accomplishments.
>   I am unemployable. Frightening, this future. What poverty ahead, what
>     mortification, what distant bag-lady horrors, when my savings are
>     gone? And why did I imagine it would be any different, imagine my
>     books would give me some slender living, or that I could at least
>    teach at the moment in life when every other teacher retires, having
>   served all those long years when I was enjoying the freedom of writer
>   and artist, unsalaried but able to survive on the little I'd been used
>   to and to invest in a farm and build it into a self-sufficient women's
>     art colony and even put a bit by. The savings might last 10 years,
>   more like seven. So in seven years I should die. But I probably won't;
>                      women in my family live forever.
>
>    Much as I tire of a life without purpose or the meaningful work that
>      would make it bearable, I can't die because the moment I do, my
>    sculpture, drawings, negatives and silkscreens will be carted off to
>                                 the dump.
>
>     The Feminist Press, in its first offer last fall (it took them 12
>     months to come up with this), suggested $500 to reprint the entire
>   text of Sexual Politics. Moreover, they couldn't get around to it till
>      the year 2000, since they'd need to commission one or two fancy
>   prefaces by younger, more wonderful women's studies scholars. My agent
>      and I were happy to refuse this offer, and the next, for $1,000.
>
>     The book also fails to attract interest from the powers that be at
>       Doubleday, who have refused to reprint it, even though another
>     division of the company is celebrating Sexual Politics with a long
>    excerpt in an anthology of the 10 most important books the house has
>   published in its 100 years. A young female editor at Doubleday gave my
>    agent to understand the work of more recent feminist scholarship had
>    somehow rendered my book obsolete in the "current climate". I am out
>        of fashion in the new academic cottage industry of feminism.
>
>    Recently a book inquired Who Stole Feminism? I sure didn't. Nor did
>      Ti-Grace Atkinson. Nor Jill Johnston. We're all out of print. We
>     haven't helped each other much, haven't been able to build solidly
>       enough to have created community or safety. Some women in this
>     generation disappeared to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion. Or
>   vanished into asylums and have yet to return to tell the tale, as has
>     Shula Firestone. There were despairs that could only end in death:
>    Maria del Drago chose suicide, so did Ellen Frankfurt, and Elizabeth
>      Fischer, founder of Aphra, the first feminist literary journal.
>
>   Eizabeth and I used to run into each other at a comfortable old hippy
>    cafe in Greenwich Village that I visited in the afternoons, writing
>    some of the darker passages of The Loony Bin Trip in public to avoid
>    the dangers of suicidal privacy at home. She'd just finished a book
>     that was her life's work. Probably it wasn't getting the reception
>   she'd hoped for in the already crowded new market of "women's studies"
>     texts written by sudden specialists in this field. Elizabeth and I
>    would eat an afternoon breakfast and chat, carefully disguising our
>   misery from each other. Feminists didn't complain to one another then;
>       each imagined the loneliness and sense of failure was unique.
>   Consciousness-raising groups were over by then. One had no colleagues:
>                        New York is not a cosy town.
>
>     Elizabeth is dead and I must live to tell the tale, hoping to tell
>       another generation something I'd like them to know of the long
>    struggle for women's liberation, something about history and America
>    and censorship. I might also hope to explain that social change does
>    not come easy, that pioneers pay dearly and in unnecessary solitude
>       for what their successors take for granted. Why do women seem
>     particularly unable to observe and revere their own history? What
>      secret shame makes us so obtuse? We did not create the community
>   necessary to support each other against the coming of age. And now we
>    have a lacuna between one generation's understanding and that of the
>    next, and have lost much of our sense of continuity and comradeship.
>
>   But I have also spent 40 years as a downtown artist habituated to the
>       existential edge and even as I proclaim that all is lost, I am
>     planning a comeback . . . imagining a sinecure in human rights for
>     extreme old age, matched editions of my collected works, and final
>                                   glory.
>
>    Just last week, after a good dinner and a good play (Arthur Miller's
>    American Clock), I lay awake scheming, adding up the farm rents and
>     seeing the way to a summer of restoration, figuring to replace the
>     slate roof on the farmhouse, to paint every building, the lavender
>   house, the blue barn.. Bundling my sums together, ecstatic that I have
>    finally paid off my credit cards, scribbling at three in the morning
>   that I will plant roses again, the ultimate gesture of success. I will
>          have won out after all. Living well is the best revenge.
>
>     And then a trip to see my elder sister, the banker/lawyer, caps my
>   determination. The Elder has a computer programme that guarantees you
>     survival on your savings at 5 per cent interest if your withdrawal
>   rate does not exceed 7 per cent - a vista of no less than 30 years. My
>       savings plus my rat's turd of social security: the two figures
>    together would give me a rock-bottom, survival existence. Thanks to
>    the magic of programmed arithmetic, I am, at one stroke, spared the
>      humiliations of searching for regular employment, institutional
>   obedience, discretion or regimentation. Looks like I can stay forever
>        footloose and bohemian, a busy artist-writer free of gainful
>    employment. Free at last - provided I live real close to the ground.
>
>     A longer version of this article appears in the summer issue of US
>                          magazine On The Issues.
>
>                            Kate Millett's life
>
>   Born 1934 in St Paul, Minnesota. Educated at University of Minnesota,
>                St Hilda's, Oxford, and Columbia, New York.
>
>     Moved to Japan in 1961. Married fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in
>                         1965; split up in the 70s.
>
>     Published Sexual Politics (1970); The Prostitution Papers (1973);
>    Flying, her autobiography (1974); Sita (1977), about her doomed love
>                         affair with another woman.
>
>   Active in feminist politics in late 60s/70s. In 1966 became committee
>     member of National Organisation for Women. In 1979 went to Iran to
>                   work for women's rights; was expelled.
>
>     In 1990 published The Loony Bin Trip, about her mental breakdown.
>
>    In 1991 was back in the news after Oliver Reed, drunk, tried to kiss
>                          her on C4's After Dark.
>
>                 In 1994 published The Politics Of Cruelty.
>
>
>                               Print version
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>      CRICKET | FOOTBALL | N&Q | ONLINE | PASSNOTES | RECRUITNET | THE
>                                 OBSERVER
>
>                 © Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998
>
>
>
The first principle of non-violent action is non-participation in
everything humiliating.
Gandhi