A Modest Exercise in Freedom
The left is at its most intelligent and most ethical when it believes—and vigorously promotes the belief—that everyone has the right to be heard.
Spring 2025
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The Radical Ellen Willis
For Willis, rock was sex, which was Freud, which was Marx, which was labor, which was politics and therefore a reason to vote or protest.
A Remembrance of Ellen Willis 
Ellen Willis, who died in November at the age of 64, was such a unique and wonderful set of contradictions—or seeming contradictions. She was a staunchly radical feminist who believed in pleasure, happiness, and freedom. She was a fierce polemicist …
Eli Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul
Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis by Eli Zaretsky Knopf, 2004, 429 pp., $30.00 That psychoanalysis has lost its once formidable authority is clear; the question remains whether its insights have been surpassed or merely …
Confronting the Contradictions
Plans for a Postwar Iraq
Ellen Willis Responds
I oppose the Bush administration’s drive to war on Iraq, though not without continuing internal argument. Should Saddam Hussein fail to comply with the Security Council’s resolution, I would have to rethink my position. In the event of a popular …
Giving Feminism Life
Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children by Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Ellen Willis Responds
I voted for Ralph Nader for several intertwined reasons. At a time when both major parties and the culture’s conventional wisdom uncritically embrace corporate power and free-market ideology, I felt it was important to support a nationally visible challenge to …
Their Libertarianism–And Ours
Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz Free Press, 1997. 314 pp. $23.00. What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Libertarianism by Charles Murray Broadway Books, 1997. 178 pp. $20.00. Those of us who call ourselves left libertarians feel …
Unquiet Feminism
Ellen Willis fits a certain stereotype of the post-1960s radical. Out of feminist principle she has renounced marriage. She opposes the war on drugs and writes unrepentantly about the acid trips of her youth. She’s a New Yorker, she’s Jewish, …
Feminism Without Freedom
Feminism Without Illusions by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. University of North Carolina Press, 1991. 348 pp. $24.95. During the earliest skirmishes between the women’s liberation movement and its New Left progenitors, one of the charges that flew our way, along with “man-hater” …
