Daily Inspiration Quote by Kate Millett

The line lands like a manifesto stripped of ornament: identity first, diagnosis second. Millett’s “We are women” isn’t a soft affirmation; it’s a political regrouping, a deliberate switch from individual grievance to collective category. Then she tightens the screw with “subject people,” borrowing the language of colonial rule to describe gender as governance: women positioned not merely as marginalized, but administered.

The phrase “inherited an alien culture” does the real work. “Inherited” suggests something passed down as normal, even loving, which is exactly the trap Millett is naming: patriarchy as tradition, absorbed through family, school, romance, religion, media. “Alien” refuses the usual consolation that culture naturally reflects us. She implies that what many call “human” values are often male-coded defaults, presented as universal while women are cast as guests in the house.

Context matters. Millett emerges from second-wave feminism and the shockwave of Sexual Politics (1970), when private life was being argued into the realm of power. Her intent isn’t to flatter women with moral superiority; it’s to make estrangement productive. If culture feels alien, that alienation can become evidence: proof that the roles, scripts, and “taste” women are trained to admire were authored elsewhere.

The subtext is a dare. Stop treating sexism as a series of bad encounters; recognize it as a comprehensive environment. Once you name women as a “subject people,” liberation stops being self-improvement and becomes decolonization: rewriting the language, the canon, the bedroom, the workplace, the story of what counts as culture at all.