Essential Ellen Willis

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) was the first rock critic for the New Yorker, an editor and columnist at the Village Voice, and cofounder of the radical feminist group Redstockings. Her writing appeared in numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and the Nation. She established the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University and wrote Beginning to See the Light and No More Nice Girls as well as Don’t Think, Smile! Her award-winning posthumous collection of rock criticism, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, was published in 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press.Nona Willis Aronowitz is a journalist and editor. She is a cofounder of Tomorrow magazine, and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, coauthor of Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism, and editor of Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music.

"There’s only one word for Ellen Willis’s work-exhilarating! Her essays combine passion and moral clarity, anger and a steady commitment to having fun. Best of all, she channels the secret ecstatic undercurrents of late twentieth-century American popular culture, which we need now more than ever. This anthology is espresso for the feminist soul." -Barbara Ehrenreich"Ellen Willis was one of the few great critics of her generation. She was theoretically sophisticated, historically informed, and courageous in her commitment to freedom. Her prose was lyrical and melodic and she was always unsettling!" -Cornel West"Fearless sweet reason, exacting style, and an unbounded sensuous spirit make Ellen Willis’s radical essays among the finest that America has ever produced." -Sean Wilentz"It’s incredible that decades after it first made waves, Ellen Willis’s writing is still as relevant as ever. From abortion and parenting to music and politics, Willis’s cultural critiques stand the test of time and fascinate over and again. The Essential Ellen Willis reinvigorated me and reminded me why I do the work that I do. It should be required reading for anyone interested in feminism, politics, and everything in between!" -Jessica Valenti"Gathering 53 career-spanning pieces, this is an act of reclamation, a reminder of what a piercing and brilliant writer Willis was." -Los Angeles Times"Willis often finds her stride in complexity, and here she intricately examines and interrogates the notions of freedom she holds dear. It’s a moving example of a wonderful mind at work." -Bookforum"The Essential Ellen Willis is watching the journalist and critic figure out how feminism translates into daily life, both for herself and for other women. Willis is intellectually rigorous and deeply idealistic, but also very fun–and her combination of curiosity, wit, skepticism, and enthusiasm grounds her work firmly in the real world." -New York Magazine's The Cut"Achieving the kind of lucidity that never flees complexity was always her goal. Spotting the antipodes hidden in seeming allegiances-and vice-versa-was one of her specialties. Re-encountering insights and stray observations of Willis’s that had stayed messily filed in my brain for 30 years or more was an ongoing pleasure." -The American Prospect"Reading Ellen Willis’ criticism has always been simultaneously invigorating and depressing for me-invigorating as a reminder that feminist thought can be radical and liberating and nuanced, but depressing when viewed against a 21st-century feminist landscape that too often prizes self-purification and bad-faith consensus over critical thinking and powerful ideas, which have come to seem like two more nice things we can’t have anymore." -Flavorwire"Part of what makes Willis perennially compelling is that she was a utopian thinker, the rigorous rather than the hippie dippy kind now beloved of 1960s detractors. These essays are still capable of making you dizzy with possibility." -Fresh Air

• Acknowledgments Introduction: TranscendenceNona Willis Aronowitz The Sixties: Up from RadicalismIntroductionSara MarcusUp from Radicalism: A Feminist Journal (US Magazine, 1969)Dylan (Cheetah, 1967)The Cultural Revolution Saved from Drowning (The New Yorker, September 1969)Women and the Myth of Consumerism (Ramparts, 1970)Talk of the Town: Hearing (The New Yorker, February 1969) The Seventies: Exile on Main StreetIntroductionIrin CarmonBeginning to See the Light (Village Voice, 1977)Janis Joplin (Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ’n’ Roll, 1980)Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life (Village Voice, May 1979)Memoirs of a Non-Prom Queen (Rolling Stone, August 1976)The Trial of Arline Hunt (Rolling Stone, 1975)Abortion: Is a Woman a Person? (Village Voice, March and April 1979)Abortion Backlash: Women Lose (Rolling Stone, November 1977)Sexual Counterrevolution I (Rolling Stone, March 1977)Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography (Village Voice, October and November 1979)The Family: Love It or Leave It (Village Voice, September 1979)Tom Wolfe’s Failed Optimism (Village Voice, 1977)The Velvet Underground (Stranded, by Greil Marcus, 1979)Next Year in Jerusalem (Rolling Stone, April 1977) The Eighties: Coming Down AgainIntroductionAnn FriedmanToward a Feminist Sexual Revolution (Social Text, Fall 1982)Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex? (Village Voice, June 1981)The Last Unmarried Person in America (Village Voice, July 1981)Teenage Sex: A Modesty Proposal (Village Voice, October 1986)Sisters under the Skin? Confronting Race and Sex (Village Voice Literary Supplement, June 1982)Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism (Social Text, Summer 1984)Escape from New York (Village Voice, July 1981)Coming Down Again: After the Age of Excess (Village Voice, January 1989)The Drug War: From Vision to Vice (Village Voice, April 1986)The Drug War: Hell No, I Won’t Go (Village Voice, September 1989)Handle with Care: We Need a Child-Rearing Movement (Village Voice, July 1986)To Emma, with Love (Village Voice, December 1989) The Nineties: Decade of DenialIntroductionCord JeffersonSelections from Decade of Denial (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)Ending Poor People As We Know Them (Village Voice, December 1994)What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about The Bell Curve (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)Rodney King’s Revenge (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000)Million Man Mirage (Village Voice, November 1995)Monica and Barbara and Primal Concerns (The New York Times, March 1999)Villains and Victims (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000) ’Tis Pity He’s a Whore (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000) Is Motherhood Moonlighting? (Newsday, March 1991)Say It Loud: Out of Wedlock and Proud (Newsday, February 1994)Bring in the Noise (The Nation, April 1996)Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity (Don’t Think, Smile!, 2000) The Aughts: Our Politics, OurselvesIntroductionSpencer AckermanThe Democrats and Left Masochism (New Politics, Summer 2001)Why I’m Not for Peace (Radical Society, April 2002)Confronting the Contradictions (Dissent, Summer 2003)The Mass Psychology of Terrorism (Implicating Empire, edited by Stanley Aronowitz, Heather Gautney, and Clyde W. Barrow, 2003)Bringing the Holy War Home (The Nation, November 2001)Dreaming of War (The Nation, September 2001)Freedom from Religion (The Nation, February 2001)Our Mobsters, Ourselves (The Nation, March 2001)Is There Still a Jewish Question?: Why I’m an Anti-Anti-Zionist (Wrestling with Zion, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, 2003)Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope (Dissent, Fall 2005)Escape from Freedom: What’s the Matter with Tom Frank? (And the Lefties Who Love Him) (Situations, 2006)Three Elegies for Susan Sontag (New Politics, Summer 2005) Coda: Selections from “The Cultural Unconscious in American Politics: Why We Need a Freudian Left” ?