Phyllis Lee Levin, Times Fashion Reporter and Biographer, Dies at 104
Her 1960 essay about the frustrations of educated women prefigured Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” She later wrote books on John Quincy Adams and others.
Phyllis Lee Levin had been a fashion reporter at The New York Times for several years in 1960 when she detoured from her beat by writing a provocative essay for the newspaper about the frustrations of college-educated women torn between what was expected of them as housewives and their desire for something more.
“The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one,” Ms. Levin wrote in her literary salvo during the early days of second-wave feminism. “Many young women — certainly not all — whose education plunged them into a world of ideas, feel stifled in their homes. They find their routine lives out of joint with their training. Like shut-ins, they feel left out.”
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