Daily Inspiration Quote by Kate Millett

The verb “committed” lands like a gavel: not “sent,” not “checked in,” but legally, clinically consigned. In a single sentence, Millett compresses the bureaucratic violence of mid-century psychiatry and the intimate violence of family power. The shock isn’t only that an institution can take you; it’s that the person who is supposed to protect you can be the one who signs the papers. “For life” turns the act from a crisis intervention into a sentence, a future foreclosed by someone else’s signature.

The second line sharpens the blade. “This is where I felt betrayed the most” refuses melodrama and, precisely because it’s understated, reads like a verdict delivered after years of replay. Millett isn’t just naming trauma; she’s isolating its core mechanism: the conversion of love into authority. The mother figure becomes an arm of the state, a private relationship drafted into public control. That’s the feminist subtext: patriarchy doesn’t always arrive wearing a uniform. Sometimes it comes through the family, through “care,” through decisions framed as protection that function as containment.

In Millett’s context, this isn’t abstract. Her work and life were shaped by battles over who gets to define “sanity,” especially for women who are sexually autonomous, politically outspoken, or simply inconvenient. The line reads as both memoir and indictment: a reminder that institutional power is most efficient when it recruits the people closest to you to do its paperwork.