17 Facts About Ellen Willis

Ellen Jane Willis was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic.

Ellen Willis's father was a police lieutenant in the New York City Police Department.

Ellen Willis attended Barnard College as an undergraduate and did graduate study at University of California, Berkeley, where she studied comparative literature.

Ellen Willis was the author of several books of collected essays.

Ellen Willis was a member of New York Radical Women and subsequently co-founder in early 1969 with Shulamith Firestone of the radical feminist group Redstockings.

Ellen Willis was one of the few women working in music criticism during its inaugural years when the field was predominantly male.

Ellen Willis was a strong supporter of women's abortion rights, and in the mid-1970s was a founding member of the pro-choice street theater and protest group No More Nice Girls.

Ellen Willis wrote a number of essays on anti-Semitism, and was particularly critical of left anti-Semitism.

Ellen Willis was the first popular music critic for the New Yorker, writing between 1968 and 1975.

Ellen Willis got the job after having published only one article on popular music, "Dylan" in the underground magazine Cheetah, in 1967.

Ellen Willis had met her second husband, sociology professor Stanley Aronowitz, in the late 1960s, and they entered a relationship some 10 years later.

Ellen Willis was survived by her husband and by her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz, who edited the collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps.

Ellen Willis was a friend of many contemporary critics, including Robert Christgau, Georgia Christgau, Greil Marcus, and Richard Goldstein.

Ellen Willis's 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.

Ellen Willis "celebrated the seriousness of pleasure and relished the pleasure of thinking seriously," a review in The New York Times said.

The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by her daughter, won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in the Criticism category.

Ellen Willis is featured in the 2014 feminist history documentary She's Beautiful When She's Angry.