Ellen Willis

Ellen Willis, journalist, feminist, cultural critic, and professor of journalism at NYU died of lung cancer on November 10, 2006. Her NYT obituary can be accessed here. It notes: “She was a founder of Redstockings, a short-lived but highly influential radical feminist group begun in 1969. In the 1980s, she helped found No More Nice Girls, a street theater and protest group that focused on abortion rights.”

The passing of Ellen Willis has been noted at many fine blogs including Le Blogue Berube, Sivacracy, and Pandagon.

Links to her articles that appeared in The Nation are available here. Her NYU homepage, with more links to essays, is here. She was an interesting and generally nuanced writer about many complicated social issues. Here is an excerpt from an essay she wrote entited “Lust Horizons: The ‘Voice’ and the Women’s Movement”:

…The cultural backlash was going strong, but there was little point in attacking the Christian right or Ronald Reagan to Voice readers. As writers and editors the feminists at the Voice were more concerned with confronting the left:which increasingly defended “traditional values” and disparaged feminist concerns like abortion as an elitist distraction from “real” issues:and conservative trends in the feminist movement itself.

During the ’80s the Voice became the prime public forum for “politically incorrect” radical-feminist libertarians who continued to criticize marriage and the family, insisted on defending abortion, not just “choice,” and advocated what would come to be known (after a piece of mine called “Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?”) as “pro-sex feminism.” We took on the anti-pornography movement, which had dominated the feminist conversation about sex: As we saw it, the claim that “pornography is violence against women” was code for the neo-Victorian idea that men want sex and women endure it.

During this period, internal tensions at the Voice ran high, in the latest version of the old battle between (mostly straight male) writers and editors of “real” political news and (largely female and gay male) purveyors of culture. We feminists saw the male politicos as hopelessly conservative. (Nat Hentoff, having decided to join the small left wing of the right-to-life movement, was a particular irritant, though in retrospect I see his presence as a useful challenge:it certainly forced me to rethink and sharpen my arguments.) They did not take kindly to our efforts to raise their consciousness about sexism in the office and in the paper:
We might have thought of ourselves as sexy rebels against feminist party lines, but they called us “Stalinist feminists,” in a foreshadowing of Rush Limbaugh’s “Feminazi” label. We retaliated by dubbing them “the white boys.” The fights often spilled over onto the Voice‘s pages:yet another way the paper was unique in documenting the culture of the left.

I found the sentence in the first excerpted paragraph: “As writers and editors the feminists at the Voice were more concerned with confronting the left:which increasingly defended “traditional values” and disparaged feminist concerns like abortion as an elitist distraction from “real” issues:and conservative trends in the feminist movement itself,” particularly arresting because it seems to me like the dismissal and disparagement of reproductive rights issues by newly empowered Supposedly Liberal Dudes is a huge problem feminists need to wrestle with right now. The vote in South Dakota helped illustrate that people care about abortion rights, but how do we get the message to the people reifying antichoice Democrats like Harry Reid?

Her essays about pornography are controversial, as writings about pornography tend to be. Many accounts I’ve seen these last few days tend to oversimplify her views, so it is worth making an effort to actually read her words if this issue is of interest.

–Ann Bartow