Although best known for writing Sexual Politics (1970), a canonical text of second-wave feminism that outlined the patriarchal institutions governing daily life through a close reading of 20th-century literature, Kate Millett (b. 1934 in St. Paul, MN; d. 2017 in Paris) described herself first and foremost as a sculptor. Millett briefly lived in Japan during the postwar period (1961–63), where she made playful artworks from household furniture, and upon her return to the United States, she was loosely associated with the Fluxus movement.
In 1966, Millett learned of the confinement, torture, and subsequent death of adolescent Sylvia Likens at the hands of her caretaker, neighbors, and other children, causing a major departure in Millett’s practice. She began to see the home as a potential site of violence and in 1967— while writing the dissertation that would become Sexual Politics—she created her first series of caged sculptures, entrapping the very domestic objects she had previously celebrated, including beds, toilets, and the closet featured in Tower with Guards (1968). Over time, mannequins bound in strips of cloth were integrated into increasingly hopeless configurations, such as the child in Approaching Futility, who climbs a ladder in an attempt at escape, or the woman in The Maja Rediscovered (both works 1975), who uses flowers to distract herself from her claustrophobic environment.
As Millett’s research into the institutions of violence grew, she became increasingly involved with broader struggles for human rights: participating in the civil rights movement, gay liberation movement, the antiwar movement that sought to end US involvement in Vietnam, as well as traveling abroad in support of international women’s rights movements. For Millett, the form of the cage was both a literal and metaphorical device, a reflection of her research into the patriarchy and the forms of oppression it empowered: the police state, the carceral system, war, domesticity, and what Millett described as “the greatest cage of all,” sex.
