10/04/2026
In 1970, Kate Millett published Sexual Politics, a book that sold 80,000 copies in its first year and went through seven printings.
It was called "the Bible of Women's Liberation" by The New York Times. It provided a coherent theory of patriarchy, dismantled the s*xism of celebrated authors like D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, and became the manifesto of second-wave feminism.
Kate Millett was featured on the cover of Time magazine. She was celebrated as a symbol of the women's liberation movement. Students gave her three standing ovations at the University of Texas.
Three years later, her family had her committed to a psychiatric institution against her will.
Katherine Murray Millett was born in 1934 in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a schoolteacher mother and an engineer father who abandoned the family when Kate was in her teens.
She was brilliant. She attended the University of Minnesota, then Oxford, where she became the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors from St. Hilda's College.
She moved to Japan, became a sculptor, taught English literature at Barnard College, then pursued her PhD at Columbia.
Her doctoral dissertation became Sexual Politics.
The book did something radical: it argued that the relationship between men and women was fundamentally political. That patriarchy wasn't natural or biological—it was a social construct designed to maintain male power.
She analyzed how this power structure penetrated literature, philosophy, psychology, and politics. She showed how celebrated novels used s*x to degrade and undermine women, disguising domination as romance.
The book made her famous. It also made her a target.
In 1973, Kate was teaching at UC Berkeley and working as an activist.
Her husband Fumio Yoshimura and her sister Sally became concerned about Kate's "extreme emotions."
They decided she needed psychiatric help.
Kate was involuntarily committed to a mental institution. A psychiatrist diagnosed her with "manic depression"—what we now call bipolar disorder.
She was prescribed lithium.
Kate fought back. She hired a lawyer named Donald Heffernan who won her freedom through a sanity trial. Together, they changed Minnesota's commitment laws to require a trial before a person could be involuntarily committed.
But the damage was done.
Once you've been diagnosed as mentally ill, Kate discovered, everything you do becomes evidence. Every emotion is a symptom. Every strong opinion is proof of instability.
For seven years, Kate took lithium as prescribed.
The medication caused hand tremors. Brain fog. Diarrhea. A pervasive mental dullness that made it nearly impossible for her to write or create art.
In 1980, she decided to stop.
She was living on her sustainable farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, with her partner Sophie Keir and a group of younger women who'd come to help for the summer.
When her family found out she'd stopped taking lithium, they panicked.
Her younger sister Mallory arrived with a doctor. They had two ambulances waiting outside Kate's apartment.
They wanted to commit her again.
Kate had to fight her instinct to cry and scream—because crying and screaming would be used as evidence that she was manic, that she needed to be hospitalized.
Thanks to New York State laws and a sympathetic police officer, Kate avoided commitment that time.
But the pattern was clear.
Later that year, Kate traveled to Ireland to support Irish hunger strikers—a political cause she believed in.
While there, she was involuntarily committed to Our Lady of Clare mental hospital near Dublin.
She was confined against her will. Stripped of agency. Subjected to enforced sedation.
In The Loony-Bin Trip, the memoir she published in 1990 about these experiences, Kate wrote about the purpose of psychiatric institutions:
"That is the purpose of this place; it was made for you to be mad in... The crime of the imaginary. The lure of madness as illness. And you crumble day by day and admit your guilt. Induced madness. Refuse a pill and you will be tied down and given a hypodermic by force."
Kate Millett identified a pattern that women recognize instantly.
When a woman challenges authority—when she writes a book dismantling patriarchy, when she speaks with conviction about injustice, when she refuses to be quiet or compliant—the response is rarely engagement with her ideas.
It is diagnosis.
Her clarity is reframed as instability. Her anger becomes evidence of pathology. Her persistence is treated as a symptom requiring medication.
In Sexual Politics, Kate had argued that patriarchy maintains power by making oppression seem natural, biological, inevitable.
In The Loony-Bin Trip, she showed exactly how that worked in practice.
She argued that conditions like manic depression and schizophrenia were labels placed on people who exhibited "socially unacceptable behavior"—people who didn't conform to norms, who challenged authority, who refused to be controlled.
"When you have been told that your mind is unsound," she wrote, "there is a kind of despair that takes over."
The diagnosis itself creates the problem it claims to treat.
Kate's experience wasn't unique to her.
Throughout history, women who were too angry, too s*xual, too ambitious, too defiant have been diagnosed as hysterical, neurotic, manic, borderline, difficult.
The medicalization of women's resistance is a feature of patriarchy, not a bug.
When a man is passionate about his work, he's driven. When a woman is, she's manic.
When a man stands his ground in an argument, he's assertive. When a woman does, she's aggressive or unstable.
When a man writes a scathing critique of society, he's a public intellectual. When a woman does, her family considers having her committed.
Kate Millett spent the rest of her life fighting against forced psychiatric hospitalization and advocating for patients' rights.
She never fully accepted the bipolar diagnosis. She believed her mental health struggles were caused by being institutionalized—not the other way around.
She eventually stopped taking lithium permanently.
She married Sophie Keir, her partner of 39 years, shortly before her death.
She died on September 6, 2017, at age 82.
Sexual Politics changed feminist theory forever. It showed how power structures operate through cultural discourse, how oppression gets packaged as nature, how literature reflects and reinforces patriarchy.
The Loony-Bin Trip showed what happens to women who write books like Sexual Politics.
They get diagnosed. They get medicated. They get confined.
Their anger at systemic injustice is reframed as a chemical imbalance. Their refusal to accept patriarchy is treated as a refusal to accept reality. Their resistance is pathologized.
Kate Millett named a pattern that women still recognize today:
When you challenge authority as a woman, the response is not "let's debate your ideas."
It's "are you okay? You seem upset. Have you considered therapy? Maybe you should calm down."
The content of your argument becomes irrelevant. The focus shifts to your emotional state, your tone, your mental health.
Your clarity becomes instability. Your anger becomes evidence. Your persistence becomes pathology.
This isn't accidental. It's structural.
Diagnosing women who challenge power is one of the most effective ways to maintain that power.
Because once you're labeled unstable, nothing you say can be trusted. Your critique of the system becomes a symptom of your illness. Your resistance proves you need treatment.
Kate Millett wrote Sexual Politics when she was 36 years old.
She was involuntarily committed when she was 39.
For the rest of her life, she fought against the idea that her mind was unsound, that her anger was irrational, that her challenges to authority were symptoms of disease.
She refused to accept that the problem was in her head rather than in the system she was critiquing.
And that refusal—that insistence on the validity of her own experience, that persistence in naming injustice—was itself treated as evidence that she was crazy.
