What a famous feminist taught me about justice over a plate of spaghetti
I met Kate Millet in a white bungalow with lavender trim on Sargent Avenue in St Paul around 1990 or ’91. I think we had spaghetti and salad for dinner, but I didn’t cook it and it wasn’t my house. We ate from the colorful hand-thrown plates created by our artist-host.
Kate had a handle on all the great feminist-writers of our day since she knew each one. Germaine Greer had just put out a book and (I think) debated Norman Mailer. “Very tall, long blond hair. Very witty. And very, very funny!” When you asked Kate a question, she began at the beginning and spoke with clarity and precision. She tended to obsess. Her focus at the time was to create a kind of “suffering index” so the real well-being (or not) of women and children could be quantified worldwide.
Her point was that we measure jobs and housing and unemployment, but to a lesser extent (if at all) the realities of those who suffer the consequences of governmental and economic failures. The impoverished simply do not have global input to specific solutions for addressing the broader roots of their suffering. War, for example, was a particular pet peeve of Millet’s as those who profit from it generally do so from afar while women and children and working-class soldiers pay the price amid devastation.
This morning, as I read her obituary, I realized that our current work as a Southeastern Connecticut Economic Recovery Task Force – we are an informal group of nonprofit leaders trying to quantify job security, living wages, the prospects of our ALICE population and our working poor – was inspired by Kate Mille
t’s obsession one night over dinner in the Midwest many years ago. #RIPKateMillet
