When Sexual Politics appeared in 1969 it detonated inside literary criticism and second-wave feminism at the same time.

Kate Millett argues that relations between men and women operate as a political system — one embedded not only in law and economics, but in culture, literature, and the private sphere.

The book is famous for its close readings of canonical male writers — particularly D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer — examining how sexual domination and hierarchy are encoded in the literary imagination. Millett’s analysis helped shift feminism into the terrain of cultural criticism, arguing that patriarchy functions as a pervasive ideological system rather than a collection of isolated injustices.

Part polemic, part literary study, Sexual Politics remains one of the defining texts of twentieth-century feminist theory.