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.

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