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Kermit The Frog

"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...