Ellen Willis facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ellen Willis
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Ellen Willis at the Village Voice in the late 1970s
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Ellen Jane Willis
December 14, 1941 New York City, New York, U.S.
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| Died | November 9, 2006 (aged 64) Queens, New York, U.S.
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| Occupation | Journalist |
| Spouse(s) | Stanley Aronowitz |
Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006) was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic. A 2014 collection of her essays, The Essential Ellen Willis, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Early life and education
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.
Career
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.
Writing and activism
Willis was known for her feminist politics. She 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 the field was predominantly male. Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays.
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 2003 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, for Rolling Stone, in 1977, about her brother's spiritual journey as a Baal Teshuva.
In 2006 she was working on a book on the importance of radical psychoanalytic thought for current social and political issues.
Personal life
Willis had met her second husband, sociology professor Stanley Aronowitz, in the late 1960s, and they entered a relationship some 10 years later. They shared domestic tasks equally. Willis died of lung cancer on November 9, 2006.
She was survived by her husband and by her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz, who edited the collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps.
Legacy
Willis 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. At one point, she and Christgau were lovers.
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.
In 2011, the first collection of Willis's music reviews and essays, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (University of Minnesota Press), was published. Willis "celebrated the seriousness of pleasure and relished the pleasure of thinking seriously," a review in The New York Times said.
On April 30, 2011, a conference at New York University, "..., Hope, & Rock 'n' Roll: The Writings of Ellen Willis", celebrated her anthology and pop music criticism.
The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by her daughter, won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in the Criticism category.
Willis is featured in the 2014 feminist history documentary She's Beautiful When She's Angry.
