Quotes from Kate Millett

If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.

Listening to the sound of the water, her sound, her lovely body glistening through the room a moment from now. There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.

There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.

There are moments in friendship, Fred had said, when the thing spreads beyond the ordinary margins, when something is said that carries you beyond the little guidemarks of restraint or indifference, like watercolours merging on a page, a moment when you survey a relationship from som transcendent point and see its beauty, the beauty of persons, of friendship itself.

Governments who manipulate population growth have two choices: making maternity pleasant, or making it inescapable.

In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels.

Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different—and this is crucial. Implicit

Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband's domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female's domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.31

The term "politics" shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another. By

For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.

Your only mistake then was in trusting the people who brought you here." I will hear this remark for the rest of my life: it will echo along the walls of my mind until all sound stops for me.

What I want is outrageous: all the possible pleasures of freedom. I want to go beyond the old system of possession, the notion of person as a thing owned. Like so many of us now, I'm experimenting with life, trying to get it right, to do it better, aware how often we're merely rationalizing — but still trying to create a new kind of social existence.

In democracies,5 for example, females have often held no office or do so (as now) in such minuscule numbers as to be below even token representation. Aristocracy,

Lady," we always call each other, partly a joke, partly in earnest, using still the old word, in its full flavor a kind of exorcism against "saleslady," "old lady," "ladylike." Relishing the anachronism, even the formality a type of aphrodisiac, a contrast to our delight in the horny, the vulgar, the vernacular which we cultivate just as ardently.

The derogation of feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal trait. Like

Yeterince erkeksi ya da kad?ns? olmamak, do?al yap?ya ayk?r? dü?mek gibi gösteriliyor. Ve hepimiz kad?n ya da erkek olarark do?du?umuz için, cinsel ki?ili?imizi yitirirsek yok olaca??m?z gibi bir dü?ünceye uyarlanmak isteniyoruz.

And what is it that you get from women?' asking me what I never asked myself. 'I don't know. Is it energy, support, tenderness? The wonder of rapport, a life experience close enough so you know the same jokes. Did your mother always warn you to wear clean underwear, just in case you had an accident?

we touched each other's center, perfectly, just the fingertip upon the clitoris moving more and more slowly, our eyes steady on each other and the delicate pressure fine and more fine until all motion stopped in one still point remembered always, a vision. And then I did not know her pleasure from mine, my body from hers. We fell into and became each other. Then we slipped over the edge, entered and made love.

despite a high incidence of women in certain professions such as medicine. The status and rewards of such professions have declined as women enter them, and they are permitted to enter such areas under a rationale that society or the state (and socialist countries are also patriarchal) rather than woman is served by such activity.

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.

Comprehending at one bound the myth of Demeter and knowing that she was Demeter, that the fountain between her thighs was my own youth and I Persephone, who had come to her in spring and would come forever, for she was my youth, older than I and yet my youth, my ever-recurrent spring, and spring itself only a metaphor for the source, the waters, the hidden river, the tunnel of life between her thighs.

She is no one, because she lacks any trait that might render her visible: beauty, money, conformity.