Ellen Willis - Biography

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

Biography

Willis was born in Manhattan to a Jewish family, and grew up in the boroughs of the Bronx and Queens in New York City. Her father was a police lieutenant in the New York City Police Department. Willis attended Barnard College 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.

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. She lived in Queens with her husband Stanley Aronowitz and her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz.

On November 9, 2006, a non-smoker, she died of lung cancer. Her papers were deposited in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, in the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in 2008.

Writing and activism

Willis was 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. She was one of the few women working in music criticism during its inaugural years, when it was predominantly 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".

She was 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 cautiously supported humanitarian intervention and, while opposed to the US invasion of Iraq, she criticized certain aspects of the anti-war movement.

Willis 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.

She 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.

Rock criticism

Willis was the first popular music critic for The New Yorker, between 1968 and 1975. As such, she was one of the first American popular music critics to write for a national audience. She got the job after having published only one article on popular music in the underground magazine Cheetah, "Dylan," in 1967. In addition to her "Rock, etc." column in the New Yorker, she also published criticism on popular music in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and for liner notes and book anthologies, most notably her essay on the Velvet Underground for the Greil Marcus "desert island disc" anthology Stranded (1979). Contemporary Richard Goldstein characterized her work as "liberationist" at its heart and said that "Ellen, Emma Goldman, and Abbie Hoffman are part of a lost tradition-radicals of desire."

She was a friend of many contemporary critics, including Robert Christgau, Georgia Christgau, Greil Marcus, and Richard Goldstein. Christgau, Joe Levy, Evelyn McDonnell, Joan Morgan, and Ann Powers have all cited her as an influence on their careers and writing styles. In 2011, the first anthology exclusively devoted to Willis's popular music writing, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (University of Minnesota Press), arrived. Willis "celebrated the seriousness of pleasure and relished the pleasure of thinking seriously," a review in The New York Times said. It was announced that a conference at New York University, Sex, Hope, & Rock 'n' Roll: The Writings of Ellen Willis, celebrated her anthology and pop music criticism on April 30, 2011.

Notes

Bibliography

Books

• Willis wrote the foreword to a book by Alice Echols

External links

• "Ellen Willis, 64, Journalist and Feminist, Dies" by Margalit Fox, New York Times, November 10, 2006.
• "Journalism professor, activist dies at 64" by Josh Burd and Nick Brennan, Washington Square News, November 10, 2006.
• "A Remembrance of Ellen Willis" by Susie Linfield, Dissent (magazine), Winter 2007.
• "Ellen Willis, 1941-2006", The Nation, November 10, 2006.
• "Ellen Willis, 64; radical critic targeted foibles wherever she saw them, on the left or right" by Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2006.
• "Remembering Ellen Willis, Rock �n� Roll Feminist Superhero" by Suzy Hansen, New York Observer, November 20, 2006.
• "Ellen Willis, 1942-2006" by Judith Levine, Seven Days, November 22, 2006.
• "My Ellen Willis" by Michael Bronski, The Boston Phoenix, November 30, 2006.
• "Sex, Hope and Rock and Roll: A Conversation with Ellen Willis" by Chris O'Connell, Pop Matters, January 8, 2007.
• "Ellen Willis Remembered" The Common Ills, November 11, 2006.
• Ellen Willis online archives – evergrowing archive of Willis's work.

Essays by Ellen Willis

• Ellen Willis Tumblr Page - large collection of Willis's writings.
• Ellen Willis NYU homepage – includes links to numerous essays.
• "We Remember Ellen Willis", Dissent, Fall 2006. – links to her essays for Dissent.
• "Ellen Willis's Reply", 1968.
• "Women and the Myth of Consumerism", Ramparts, 1969.
• "Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs", Village Voice, September 19, 1989.
• "We Need a Radical Left", The Nation, June 29, 1998.
• "Monica and Barbara and Primal Concerns", New York Times, March 14, 1999.
• "Vote for Ralph Nader!", Salon, November 6, 2000.
• "The Democrats and Left Masochism", New Politics #31 (new series), Summer, 2001.
• "The Realities of War" (A response to Elaine Scarry's “Citizenship in Emergency”), Boston Review, October/November 2002.
• "Can Marriage Be Saved?: A Forum" (II), The Nation, June 17, 2004.
• "The Pernicious Concept of 'Balance'", The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2005. Note: scroll down page.
• "Commentary on Maxine Greene's The Dialectic of Freedom"

Reviews and critiques of Ellen Willis

• Review of Beginning to See the Light by Liza Featherstone, The Nation, August 8, 2002.
• Review of Don't Think, Smile! by Eugene McCarraher, Commonweal, October 22, 1999.
• Review of Don't Think, Smile! and interview with Ellen Willis by Michael Bronski, Weekly Wire, November 29, 1999.
• Review of Don't Think, Smile! by Marcy Sheiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 29, 2000.
• Bully in the Pulpit? (Discussion of Ellen Willis "Freedom From Religion"), The Nation, February 22, 2001.
• "Open Letter to Ellen Willis" by Louis Proyect, PEN-L (internet mailing list), March 25, 2003.

Interviews

• "Ellen Willis, Feminist and Writer", Fresh Air, November 10, 2006 (originally broadcast February 14, 1989). (page links to RealAudio audio file)
• Interview with Ellen Willis and others on Implicating Empire by Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer (radio), March 27, 2003. (page links to MP3 audio)