Aging & Wisdom Quote by Kate Millett

Brutal in its plainness, Millett frames institutionalization as an economic technology, not a medical response. "When you got boxed" reduces confinement to a thudding, final action: one strike and you are contained. The slangy bluntness matters. It refuses the soothing vocabulary that institutions prefer, the language that turns coercion into care.

Her pivot to "the farm" snaps the reader into motive. This is not primarily about delusion or diagnosis; its about inheritance, land, and the quiet incentives families and local authorities had to disappear inconvenient relatives. Old age becomes a legal vulnerability, not a life stage. Millett is pointing to a system where psychiatry can function as paperwork with locks: declare someone unfit, take control of assets, and let the building do the rest.

The subtext is feminist, but not only. Millett, writing from an activist tradition that treated "the personal" as a site of governance, exposes how authority works through domestic arrangements: kinship, property law, and professional credentialing. The repetition - "property...property" - is accusation and diagnosis. It suggests that the institution mirrors the broader social order, where personhood is conditional and easily revoked when money, land, or reputation is at stake.

Contextually, this lands in the long shadow of asylums, guardianship abuses, and the pathologizing of nonconformity - including womens anger, sexuality, and dissent. Millett is not asking us to pity the confined; she is asking us to see confinement as an extension of ownership. The horror is that it can look respectable.