On Sunday, December 3, 6-7 PM on WBAI at 99.5 FM (streaming at wbai.org), Joy of Resistance: Multicultural Feminist Radio at WBAI will play excerpts from the recent celebration of the life of Kate Millett. We will also interview Kathie Sarachild, a pioneer feminist who will help to put Millett’s work in historical context. After the show, you can find a recording on the WBAI website.
On November 9, people from all over the world came together, filling the Unitarian Universalist Church on Central Park West, to pay tribute to the life of Millett.
Millett is best known author of the 1970 feminist classic “Sexual Politics“, which got her on the cover of Time magazine and attacked for her honest answer to the reporter’s question: “Are you bisexual?” She was also an activist who went to Iran in 1979 to support Iranian women against religious theocracy, a lifelong artist, the founder of a women’s art colony and an intellectual adventurer who explored edgy and taboo subjects such as her own incarceration in a mental hospital (The Loony Bin Trip) and the phenomenon of torture between women (The Politics of Cruelty). Millett was a downtown artist who lived in a loft on the Bowery and long after she was famous, sold Christmas trees on the street to make a living.
Speakers at the memorial, many of whom you will hear on this program, included Yoko Ono, Gloria Steinem, Phyllis Chesler, Nicole Fernandez Ferrar, Executive Director of the Simone de Beauvoir Center (in Paris), Kathleen Turner and Eleanor Pam, President of Veteran Feminists of America (which organized the event). Hillary Clinton sent a message and Holly Near sang.
The atmosphere in the huge church was one of love for Kate Millett and awe and acknowledgment at the giant changes that the movement of which she was an important part has made in all of our lives.