The Essential Ellen Willis

Images

Ellen Willis at her office at New York University in the midnineties. She founded the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program there in 1995. Ellen in the late sixties, in hippie mode. Ellen’s high school graduation photo. She was always mortified by the heinous pre–Janis Joplin haircut options for curly-haired girls. A sample of Ellen’s reading material. Those flowered sheets were still around when Nona Willis Aronowitz, her daughter, was a kid in the eighties. Ellen Willis in upstate New York in 1970. Ellen was a meticulous and slow writer; her essay “Dylan” took seven months to write. She transcribed Dylan’s lyrics by hand (and sometimes got them wrong). Ellen created a satiric comic book series using stick figures, based on Norman Podhoretz’s “Making It,” in the late sixties. Some years later, the Voice gave it real illustrations. Pamphlet from a conference on sexuality at Barnard College in 1982. Ellen’s notes before the sex conference at Barnard, in which she echoes the pro-sex sentiments she expresses in “Lust Horizons.” Ellen at the 2004 March for Women’s Lives, accompanied by her sister, Penny Froman (center), and cousin, Judy Oppenheimer (far right). In 1967–68, Ellen created a flowchart of philosophies for Esquire. Wilhelm Reich, a profound influence on her, gets major props. Ellen and Nona read a book at Nona’s group day care in Park Slope. This photograph is one of the outtakes for “The Diaper Manifesto: We Need a Child-Rearing Movement.” ...