Willis, Ellen

Ellen Jane Willis was born in New York City on December 14, 1941, the first daughter of Miriam Weinberger and Melvin Willis, a police officer. Willis was raised in Queens, along with two younger siblings, Michael and Penny. Willis attended Barnard College (A.B. 1962). She married Harvey Leifert in June 1962, and they moved to California later that summer, where Willis completed one year of graduate study in literature at University of California, Berkeley, while Leifert taught at San Francisco State University. In 1965, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Leifert trained for a post in the U.S. Foreign Service. Just before Harvey Leifert was posted to Ethiopia, the couple separated, and Willis returned to New York to become a journalist. They were divorced in 1967, while Leifert was still abroad. In 1998, Willis married sociologist and radical activist Stanley Aronowitz, with whom she had been living since the early 1980s. Their daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz, was born in 1984.

Willis wrote for Mademoiselle and Seventeen while still in college. As a result of her work there, she was hired to write a college advice book, Questions Freshman Ask: A Guide for College Girls (1962). In the late 1960s she began writing about rock music, radical politics, and feminism. In 1968 she served as associate editor and then managing editor of a short-lived magazine on music and popular culture, Cheetah . She was one of the founders of the radical feminist group Redstockings in 1969, and several of her early feminist writings were widely reprinted and circulated.

Willis was the first rock columnist for the New Yorker ; she wrote the "Rock, Etc." column from 1968 to 1975. She was a contributing editor at Ms. (1972 to 1975), and at Rolling Stone (1976 to 1978), where she also wrote a column, "Alternating Currents." Willis was a staff writer at the Village Voice from 1979 to 1983, and a senior editor there from 1984 to 1990. In 1981, Willis formed No More Nice Girls, a pro-abortion street theater action group, with other women writers at the Voice .

Willis wrote widely about feminist and radical left politics, rock music, and cultural trends. She was critical of feminists who campaigned against pornography, and was on the planning committee of Barnard College's "The Scholar and The Feminist Conference IX" in 1982, which took up questions of sexuality, pleasure, and pornography. She wrote often about anti-Semitism, political oppression worldwide, and psychoanalysis, among other topics. After the birth of her daughter, she wrote a series of articles in the Village Voice on motherhood, radical family politics, and child care, and worked on a never-published book on those and similar topics. At the end of her life she was working on a book about Wilhelm Reich and radical psychoanalytic thought.

Beginning in 1990, Willis taught journalism at New York University. In 1995 she created and directed a Masters program there in Cultural Reporting and Criticism. She lectured widely and attended numerous academic conferences.

Willis published several books of her collected columns and essays: Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981; reissued with a new introduction in 1992 as Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock and Roll ); No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1993); and Don't Think, Smile! Notes on a Decade of Denial (1999). Willis died of lung cancer in New York City on November 9, 2006.