Politics & Power Quote by Kate Millett

Millett’s line lands like an accusation disguised as a definition: psychiatry, in her telling, isn’t primarily a healing profession but an enforcement mechanism. The phrase “property arm of the government” is deliberately jarring. It yokes the language of ownership to the machinery of the state, suggesting a pipeline from domestic grievance to institutional confinement. That fusion is the point: power doesn’t always arrive with a baton; sometimes it arrives with paperwork, diagnoses, and the aura of expertise.

The knife twist is in the casual, almost conversational ending: “if your husband doesn’t like you.” It’s not just about one bad marriage; it’s about how private disapproval can become public punishment when institutions are built to credit men’s narratives over women’s autonomy. Millett implies that the “patient” is often a political subject: a woman who is inconvenient, loud, sexual, angry, noncompliant. Label her unstable, and you don’t have to argue with her.

The context is second-wave feminism colliding with mid-20th-century psychiatric authority, when involuntary commitment and “hysteria”-adjacent thinking still haunted women’s lives, and when homosexuality and other nonconformities were medicalized. Millett herself was forcibly hospitalized and wrote about it, making the charge intensely personal as well as structural. The intent isn’t to deny mental illness; it’s to expose how diagnosis can be conscripted into social control, especially when the state and the family share the same goal: keeping women in their place.