Time & Perspective Quote by Kate Millett

Millett doesn’t just accuse patriarchy of unfairness; she indicts it for a kind of cultural animal husbandry. The phrase “great mass” deliberately resists the comforting escape hatch of exceptional women. It’s a blunt statistical cudgel: history isn’t redeemed by a handful of queens, saints, or salonnières if the default setting for most women was enclosure.

Her most provocative move is the language of “animal life,” not to dehumanize women, but to expose a system that treated women as if their personhood were incidental to their utility. By repeating “animal” and “functions,” she mimics the cold diction of biology and management, the way institutions talk when they want to make domination sound like nature. “Sexual outlet” is especially sharp: it reduces male desire to a pressure valve and reveals the moral asymmetry embedded in traditional sexual codes, where men’s appetites become inevitable and women’s autonomy becomes negotiable.

Context matters. Millett emerged from late-1960s and 1970s second-wave feminism, when “the personal is political” was a serious analytic tool, not a slogan. Her argument aligns with radical feminist critiques that located women’s oppression not primarily in attitudes but in the organization of sex, family, labor, and culture. The subtext is a dare: if you want to call a social order “civilization,” you have to account for whose lives were allowed to be fully human within it. The quote works because it refuses euphemism. It makes readers feel the insult that “tradition” often asks women to swallow as normal.