KATE MILLETT - WE'VE ONLY JUST BEGUN

When Sexual Politics was published in 1969, Kate Millett provided a backbone of theory to the emerging feminist movement in the United States. She analysed the whole social fabric and human behaviour in terms of the effects of long established patriarchy. Since then she has written several other books and been involved in several civil rights movement~ throughout the world.

Perhaps for these reasons the huge numbers that turned out to see and hear Kate Millett in Liberty Hall recently expected a substantially advanced analysis of the place of women in western society based on a decade's experience. Instead, they heard a synopsis of the themes of Sexual Politics - with many of the examples used repeated from the original text. An enlightening experience for some, but surely a disappointment for those who read the book ten years ago and used it as a starting point.

Now, as then, Kate Millett is convinced of the essential brutality of the patriarchal system in which, she feels, the relation between the sexes is one based on power. "I remember it dawning on me when I was about 5 years old. You look about you and all the symbols of authority are male. The control of every institution and of every kind of authority - military, technical, scholarly, political - are in male hands. Women are the ones that use, say, typewriters, but we are not part of the system that makes and designs them. We are given a kind of renaissance education." Women are further controlled within the institutions of the family and religion. "I've studied every patriarchal society and they all have patriarchal religions. God always seems to be a man and all his best friends are men too. Religions seem to be inevitably ways in which we are further oppressed because the divinity itself is masculine."

 Rather than develop new ideas Kate Millett in the last decade has accumulated more ammunition to further prove her original point. Not only does she think that the patriarchy must end if women are to be equal citizens, she also thinks an end to patriarchy as essential to the continuation of the species  - that the current threats to world peace are direct results of a male dominated world.

''We now live in the last phase of a brutal form of social organisation and male domination. We're in a stage now that, to stay alive on this planet, we really have to change the course of patriarchal control, and we who give life ought to be consulted about what will happen to this planet and what has happened."

Kate Millett is particularly concerned with what she sees as the expanse of the brutality of the patriarchal American empire, and its support for repressive regimes who practise torture of political prisoners. ''We live in a dying patriarchy becoming more violent cruel and crazy, which is intent on spreading nuclear death. . . We live in a time of torturers, of an empire that needs no soldiers, it already has businessmen. . . We are heading toward a totalitarian holocaust led by that peanut farmer or the other guy who is worse."

In the presidential elections, Kate Millett is voting for the Socialist Workers Party, although she might have supported the Democratic Party had Ted Kennedy won the nomination - "He reminded the Democratic Party that it had sold out and how easily it had sold out the American people."

Her disgust with the new American conservatism has led directly to her search for her Irish antecedents and alternative citizenship. As a pacifist, she feels very strongly that she doesn't want to be a party to "American crimes", and despite her optimistic words about the growth of the women's movement in the last ten years, she feels that oppression is growing in America. "I will not be a prisoner there and that is what they are making us."

Publicly she is very encouraging about the impact of the women's movement on men. "I think one of the most important things that men have done in my time is re-examine the whole idea of being sent to war. I find that the most crucial kind of co-operation with patriarchal power and if men can learn that its better to be alive and gentle than dead' or a killer then that's an advance already over the past." Privately, she is not so enthusiastic about the latest crop of young people, particularly in America "they were so stupid they didn't even protest the re-introduction of the draft. "

For Kate Millett, in 1980 as in 1969, society is clearly divided in terms of sex rather than class or nationality. She is convinced that although the women's movement has been, for the most part, a middle class movement, it is of particular importance to working class women. "I think the gains for working class women are even more obvious than the gains for middle class women. As you know one of the most important things is equal pay and who can be more affected by that than working women? Women earn the least money in my country. We earn only 60 per cent of what men earn. No matter what our education we are underpaid, whatever our training or competence we are discriminated against not only in what we're paid but in all opportunities for advancement. For all the service we've paid to the trade union movement we've still never got organised labour, we're still underpaid and not protected in any way. What unions we've had were phoney. The best thing that could happen to working class women is a strong feminist movement."

Women constitute their own class because their traditional class identification was only by association with a man, be he husband or father, and was subject to arbitrary change. Even with the advances of the last decade, and the emergence of the professional working woman - admittedly rare in Ireland but more common in the United States - Kate Millett feels that all women, rich and poor, constitute a class. "These women made great strides because of the women's movement and they feel great solidarity because of this. If they didn't they'd be dangerous. "

Internationally, the debate within the feminist movement about the imposition of western values in the name of feminism, particularly in Islamic countries, causes Kate Millett no qualms. She condemns the Khomeini regime as counter-revolutionary. "The reason I went to Iran in the beginning was that I'd spent seven years working against the Shah and his atrocities. He was very much like Hitler. There were thousands of people executed and many thousands tortured. . . When the insurrection came I was invited along with Bernadette Devlin and Simone de Beauvoir to come and celebrate International Women's Day. There was a very small group of women hoping, now that the country was free, to build a women's movement. On the day of our little meeting Khomeini declared the veil mandatory to every woman in Persia. Five thousand marched to the central committee headquarters in protest. That night our little meeting was a big one and the next day we demonstrated and ~very day following for a few wonderful days. Then as you know, everything closed down. We were called prostitutes (when we protested) and the men who marched at our side were persecuted with another word. Faggot.

"It gives you a notion of how sick the entire sexual culture is. They're now executing women in Iran, stoning them to death buried to the neck, and they recite prayers while they commit these blasphemies. . . Now we have a predicament where the United States could have ransomed its hostages two weeks ago by simply unfreezing Iranian funds, and giving back the money. It belongs to them anyhow and Carter could at least apologise for foisting tyranny on the Iranian people for all these years."

 The name-calling experience in Iran, along with the research leading up to her book, The Prostitution Papers, has given Kate Millett a great feeling of sympathy for the problems of prostitutes. "Having talked with them (prostitutes) for weeks and built up trust and confidence, they told me that their lives were endlessly persecuted by pimps, by the police by magistrates, by fines. They are victims of hypocritical laws that punish only the women and not the two parties involved in the transaction. The more listened to them, about their lives the more unfair the entire treatment of them through history seemed to me, the more compelling it was that women be compassionate and unite with each other on this. The system of prostitution and the sale and exploitation of women is something that concerns us all. Rather than abolish it, you should decriminalise it and make it a private affair between two people."

As a civil rights worker, she is not troubled by the apparent contradiction of being anti-pornography and yet anti-censorship at the same time. "Well you know the whole purpose of the first amendment is to ensure that the issue of free speech is for everybody. So, we women see ourselves as victims of a kind of bizarre propaganda where the issue is not eroticism or freedom' of expression. The problem with pornography is that it is violent, it's cruel, it's picture after picture of women being tied up, beaten up, raped. These have nothing to do with sexuality. They are in fact crimes of aggression. We see pornography as a kind of neo-propaganda for sexism and male chauvinism. If it were directed against blacks or Jews it would be socially unacceptable. But the humanity of women, it seems has yet to be established. All sorts of crimes against our humanity are passed off as forms of entertainment. It seems to be a sad backlash reaction. We're not trying to censor anything. In fact what the women on the Women Against Violence Against Women committee in New York do is take people on tours through 42nd Street. Far from suppressing, what we are trying to do is expose the inhumanity in this supposed form of entertainment."

Kate Millett's view of Ireland is romantic, harping back to the Breton Laws and "a time when Ireland was not so up tight and blue in the face." She thinks patriarchal attitudes here are part of the colonial mentality - "The invasion of Ireland seems to have given one of the last strongholds of female freedom and equality a regime that is very patriarchal. Divorce is forbidden to women and the right to control their own bodies."

On abortion: "I don't think people really understand these issues well. I would underline again that I think abortion is only a last resort - if contraception fails and a whole lifetime is in the balance or a child is deeply not wanted or so forth. The real thing is to get people to use contraception intelligently. And in places where they have every access to it and are supposed to be informed they're still not using it. If you look deeply into the motives its because people are still deeply ashamed. They have been conditioned to a persuasive and dreadful sexual shame by everything in patriarchal culture. It's a deeply repressive culture, puritanical, against sex, against the flesh, against pleasure. Involved in a thousand little rules about how and in just which way people can make love. These are invasions of human freedom in which the state has no part at all. You still have people endlessly having children without forethought, because they're still ashamed of the mechanisms of their own bodies. Imagine how stupid this is in view of the fact that a child might be brought into the world. I think it's time we recovered from whatever sad barbarian fears and terrors of what is after all one of the few great human happinesses and we've made it miserable."

If it was good to hear the author of one of the seminal works of feminism expound again the basics of the movement, it was even better to see Liberty Hall packed for the occasion. And if the fact that Kate Millett has not continued developing an analysis of the more subtle and problematic issues facing that movement was a little disappointing, the fact that so many women now count themselves part of the movement is cheering.

In the event, their presence and enthusiasm on the political stage says more than one woman ever could.