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.
It was not an especially fraught time for Ms. Levin, who was raising young children and had a supportive husband. But she nonetheless knew that she was paid less than her male colleagues and had fewer opportunities for promotion.
“I knew several women who were aiming for something outside their home, and I decided I wanted to write about that,” she recalled in “An Unruly Career: Phyllis Levin, Work and Family,” a 2024 biography by Thomas H. Lee.
Her essay was quoted by the feminist crusader Betty Friedan in the groundbreaking 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” cited as part of the cultural ether in 1960, when “the problem that has no name” — the hidden dissatisfaction of women — “burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife,” as Ms. Friedan put it.
Ms. Levin — whose writing later expanded to include biographies of the first lady Abigail Adams and her son John Quincy Adams, as well as a book about Edith Wilson’s role in governing the country after President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke — died on Nov. 27 at her home in Manhattan. She was 104.
Phyllis Lee Schwalbe was born on March 11, 1921, in Brooklyn and moved with her family to Manhattan when she was about 12. Her father, Jacob, ran a produce distribution business, and her mother, Ruth (Glickman) Schwalbe, oversaw the home and gave Phyllis an informal education in fashion and the arts.
Phyllis earned a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she studied music and English. After her first job, as a copy editor for a plastics newsletter, she became an editorial assistant at Mademoiselle magazine, where she met writers like Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, who had recently published the novel “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”
In 1944, she was promoted to editor of Mademoiselle’s annual college issue, which brought together about a dozen undergraduate women to work on a special edition about college news, fashions and fads.
The next year, she married Wilbur Levin, known as Bill, and moved to a writing position at the magazine. Ms. Levin left the magazine in about 1948 to join The Times as an assistant to Virginia Pope, the fashion editor. She eventually began to write about fashion.
Ms. Levin left The Times after the births of each of her four children and to take jobs at Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s. But she regularly returned to the paper.
The female reporters and editors who worked on the women’s section of The Times were isolated for many years on the ninth floor of the paper’s building on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, largely overlooked by their male colleagues in the newsroom six floors below.
“We were in some dark little corner of The Times,” Ms. Levin recalled in 2018. “It was as if we kept the measles up on the ninth floor.”
But she felt a strong sense of camaraderie with her co-workers. “They were the most incredible, smart, wonderful women,” her daughter Emme Deland, who confirmed Ms. Levin’s death, said in an interview. “While they clearly felt grossly underpaid compared with the men, I’d call it a qualified frustration, because they were in such good company.”
In the mid-1960s, after writing a regular feature on parenting for the paper’s Sunday magazine for about a year, Ms. Levin left The Times to write her first book, “The Wheels of Fashion” (1965), about the fashion industry. She published “Great Historic Houses of America,” a coffee-table book, in 1970.
While researching President John Adams’s Old House at Peacefield, in Quincy, Mass., Ms. Levin read two volumes of his wife’s letters, which inspired her to write “Abigail Adams: A Biography” (1987).
“I was drawn to her because she wrote so poignantly,” Ms. Levin told The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 1989. “I still find the truthfulness and talent of this woman compelling. Her willingness to sacrifice and her vision for women and this country were breathtaking.”
A deliberate writer and researcher, Ms. Levin published her next book in 2001. “Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House” focused on the Wilsons’ marriage — his second — and how the ambitious, protective first lady consolidated power after his stroke in 1919.
Reviewing the book for The Washington Post Book World, Edwin Yoder Jr. described it as “the fullest and most authoritative retelling to date of the story of Edith Bolling Wilson’s self-anointed regency during her husband’s devastating illness.”
Ms. Levin returned to the Adams family in 2015 for “The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams,” which detailed his life up to his appointment as secretary of state in 1817, seven years before he was elected president.
Before she turned 102, Ms. Levin completed “John Quincy Adams and the Blessing of Liberty” (2023), a short, self-published book about Adams’s post-presidential efforts to end slavery while serving in the House of Representatives.
“She felt that John Quincy didn’t get the credit that he deserved for his political and moral role in the fight to end slavery,” Ms. Deland said.
In addition to her Ms. Deland, Ms. Levin is survived by three other children, Kate, John and Peter Levin; seven grandchildren; 12 great-grandchildren; and a sister, Marjory Berkowitz. Mr. Levin, who was appointed Kings County clerk in Brooklyn in 1989 after serving as chief executive of a bank, died in 2005.
The 14 years that Ms. Levin spent on her Abigail Adams biography meant that the nation’s second first lady was a formidable presence in the Levin family.
“Abigail was talked about at the dinner table as if she just stepped out of the room,” Ms. Levin told The Morning Call. “My youngest daughter, Kate, who really grew up with her, once made a small sculpture for me and named it Abigail.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
The post Phyllis Lee Levin, Times Fashion Reporter and Biographer, Dies at 104 appeared first on New York Times.
