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Excerpt from the Talk of the Town by Ellen Willis about the feminist disruption of the all-male (save one nun) New York abortion law hearings. Published in the New Yorker, February 22, 1969 and, Nona tells me, about to be republished in the forthcoming anthology!
OMG Sandra Fluke flashbacks.
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—notes from Ellen Willis’ Bob Dylan piece, which took her seven months to write
Mom would have been an ultranervous blogger.
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Birthday cake.
It’s my mom Ellen Willis’ birthday today. She would have been 71. Every year, I figure the best way of honoring her is to read my favorite pieces she’s written—things that push me to consider every moment of my life, and to fit together cultural forces like puzzle pieces. Here’s what I’m reading this year:
Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life, which Susie Bright once read on her podcast
Women and the Myth of Consumerism, just in time for the holidays
Our Mobsters, Ourselves, a perfect companion to my current “Sopranos” marathon.
Escape from New York, in No More Nice Girls (which, along with Beginning to See the Light, is now back in print. Emily Books also made it an ebook if you’re into that instead.)
Coming Down Again, in No More Nice Girls
Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity, in Don’t Think, Smile!—an essay that has never been more relevant to my life
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Dylan is now free to work on his own terms. It would be foolish to predict what he will do next. But I hope he will remain a mediator, using the language of pop to transcend it. If the gap between past and present continues to widen, such mediation may be crucial. In a communication crisis, the true prophets are the translators.
– Ellen Willis, “Before the Flood” (from Cheetah, 1967) -
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, the in-process documentary about the birth of the women’s movement that features Ellen Willis (and me!), has just launched a Kickstarter. Give them $$$$ or a tweet or a reblog!
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A fair and generous woman is (at best) respected, but seldom loved.
– the realest of talk from Redstockings co-conspirator Shulamith Firestone. (via theothernwa) -
“When feminism first erupted, it was for me an extremely erotic moment, ‘cause I think, for the first time, I saw the possibility of what I was really being beautiful.”
—Ellen Willis
Filmmakers Mary Dore and Nancy Kennedy are making a documentary about early radical feminists, called She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry—and both my mom and I are in it.
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The constant celebration of homemaking in the media cannot conceal the fact that most housework is dirty and boring. Most people would prefer just about any job to being a domestic servant; few single women would stand for a female roommate trying to stick them with all the cleaning. But to do the same dirty work for a husband is supposed to be a privilege. The rationalization is usually that women are inherently altruistic, which makes about as much as Senator George Murphy’s remark that Mexicans are better suited to stoop labor because they are ‘built low to the ground.’
– Ellen Willis in Mademoiselle, September 1969. (EW said in a 1989 Terry Gross interview that, besides sex, the single thing responsible for radicalizing her was housework.) -
I especially enjoyed the way he moved… projecting a sense of maleness that depended not on the exclusion or denigration or conquest of women but on his appreciation of his body and what it could do.
–Ellen Willis on Bruce Springsteen, 1974.
James Deen vibes.
(via theothernwa)
