Keeping tabs on authors in LINKcat: Phyllis Lee Levin

 

LINKcat

New York Times, 12/24/2025

Richard Sandomir reports:

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.” 

Ms. Levin, a 1941 graduate of Mount Holyoke College, added: “The reason a college bred housewife often feels like a two-headed schizophrenic is this: She used to talk about whether music was frozen architecture; now she talks over frozen food plans. Once she wrote a paper on the Graveyard Poets; now she writes notes to the milkman. Once she determined the boiling point of sulfuric acid; now she determines her boiling point with the overdue repairman.” 

At 1,400 words, the essay landed in The Times during a patriarchal era. It appeared deep inside the paper, on a page devoted to women’s news — labeled “Food Fashion Family Furnishings” — sharing space with a recipe for chicken livers and poppy seeds and articles on roof repair, tropical fashions and ice cream flavors.

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