On August 31, 1970, Kate Millett — who died last week at age eighty-two — appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Millett, the author of Sexual Politics, a wide-ranging study of gender, politics, and culture based on her PhD dissertation, was an unlikely subject for a cover that typically featured politicians, celebrities, and athletes. But nothing in 1970 was typical when it came to how the media dealt with women and feminism.

Like much mainstream coverage of feminism during those early, heady days of the movement, the package of articles that appeared alongside the Time cover were all over the place.

One piece famously referred to Millett as “the Mao Tse-Tung of feminism,” before giving a straightforward account of the recent feminist movement, detailing many of its accomplishments. It was full of “on the one hand” back and forths, pitting Gloria Steinem and anti-feminist Lionel Tiger against each other in competing editorials, quoting a string of “ordinary people” alternatively sympathetic to and contemptuous of feminism. The text was confusing, but the subtext was clear: something was afoot, and Time was scrambling to catch up.