Ellen Willis

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Ellen Jane Willis
Born December 14, 1941(1941-12-14)
Manhattan, New York, New York
Died November 9, 2006 (aged 64)
Queens, New York, New York
Occupation Journalist
Spouse(s) Stanley Aronowitz

Contents

Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006) was an American political essayist, journalist, and pop music critic.

[edit] Biography

Willis was born in Manhattan, and grew up in the boroughs of the Bronx and Queens in New York City[1]. Her father was a police lieutenant in the New York City Police Department.[1] Willis attended Barnard College[1] as an undergraduate and did graduate study at University of California, Berkeley, where she studied comparative literature for a semester but left graduate school shortly afterwards[citation needed]. In the late 1960s and 1970s, she was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, and later wrote for, among others, the Village Voice, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Slate, and Salon, as well as Dissent, where she was also on the editorial board. She was the author of several books of collected essays. At the time of her death, she was a professor in the journalism department of New York University and the head of its Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism.[2] She lived in Queens with her husband Stanley Aronowitz and her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz. On November 9, 2006, she died of lung cancer.[2]

[edit] Writing and activism

She is also known for her feminist politics and was a member of New York Radical Women and subsequently co-founder in early 1969 with Shulamith Firestone of the radical feminist group Redstockings.[3] She was one of the few women working in music criticism during its inaugural years, when it was by and large a male-dominated field. Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays that were highly critical of anti-pornography feminism, criticizing it for what she saw as its sexual puritanism and moral authoritarianism, as well as its threat to free speech. These essays were among the earliest expressions of feminist opposition to the anti-pornography movement. Her 1981 essay, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" is the origin of the term, "pro-sex feminism".[4] She was also a strong supporter of women's abortion rights, and in the early 1980s was a founding member of the pro-choice street theater and protest group No More Nice Girls.

A self-described anti-authoritarian democratic socialist, she was very critical of what she viewed as social conservatism and authoritarianism on both the political right and left. In cultural politics, she was equally opposed to the idea that cultural issues are politically unimportant, as well as to strong forms of identity politics and their manifestation as political correctness. In several essays and interviews written since the September 11 attacks, she was cautiously supportive of the idea of humanitarian intervention and, while opposed to the US invasion of Iraq,[5] she was critical of certain aspects of the anti-war movement.[6][7]

Coming from a Jewish background, Willis also wrote a number of essays on anti-Semitism, and was particularly critical of left anti-Semitism. Occasionally she wrote about Judaism itself, penning a particularly notable essay about her brother's spiritual journey as a Baal Teshuva for Rolling Stone in 1977.[8]

Willis saw political authoritarianism and sexual repression as closely linked, an idea first advanced by psychologist Wilhelm Reich; much of Willis' writing advances a Reichian or radical Freudian analysis of such phenomena. In 2006 she was working on a book on the importance of radical psychoanalytic thought to current social and political issues.[2]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c Margalit Fox, Ellen Willis, 64, Journalist and Feminist, Dies, New York Times, November 10, 2006.
  2. ^ a b c Official page on the site of the Department of Journalism, New York University, accessed 7 July 2007
  3. ^ Ellen Willis, "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism", 1984, collected in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays, Wesleyan University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-8195-5250-X, p. 117–150, especially p. 119, 124.
  4. ^ Ellen Willis, Lust Horizons: The 'Voice' and the women's movement, Village Voice 50th Anniversary Issue, 2007. This is not the original "Lust Horizons" essay, but a retrospective essay mentioning that essay as the origin of the term. Accessed online 7 July 2007. A lightly revised version of the original "Lust Horizons" essay can be found in No More Nice Girls, p. 3–14.
  5. ^ Ellen Willis, Ellen Willis Responds, Dissent, Winter 2003. Accessed online 7 July 2007.
  6. ^ Why I'm not for Peace, Radical Society, April 2002, p. 13–19; copy formerly posted on Willis's NYU faculty site was archived on the Internet Archive 23 December 2005. Accessed online 7 July 2007.
  7. ^ March 27, 2003 broadcast, Doug Henwood's radio archives, Left Business Observer.
  8. ^ Ellen Willis, Next Year in Jerusalem, originally published in Rolling Stone, April 1977.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

  • Willis, Ellen (1962). Questions Freshmen Ask: A Guide for College Girls. New York: Dutton. 
  • Willis, Ellen (1981). Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade. New York: Knopf : distributed by Random House. ISBN 0-394-51137-9. 
  • Willis, Ellen (1992). Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll. 2d ed.. Hanover: Wesleyan. ISBN 0819562556. 
  • Willis, Ellen (1992). No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays. Hanover, NH: Published by University Press of New England [for] Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-5250-X. 
  • Willis, Ellen (1999). Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial. Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-4320-6. 
  • Echols, Alice (1989). Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816617864.  Willis wrote the foreword to a book by Alice Echols

[edit] External links

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[edit] Essays by Ellen Willis

[edit] Reviews and critiques of Ellen Willis

[edit] Interviews

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