Phyl­lis Lee Levin obit

New York Times fash­ion reporter also wrote first lady bio­graph­ies

 

She was not on the list.

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,” 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.”

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 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 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 Friedan put it.

Levin — whose writ­ing later expan­ded to include bio­graph­ies of 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. Phyl­lis 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.

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,” 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 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, 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, Mas­sachu­setts, 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,” Levin told The Morn­ing Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, 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, 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.”

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, Levin com­pleted “John Quincy Adams and the Bless­ing of Liberty” (2023), a short, self-pub­lished book about Adams’ 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,” Deland said.

In addi­tion to Deland, Levin is sur­vived by three other chil­dren, Kate, John and Peter Levin; seven grand­chil­dren; 12 great-grand­chil­dren; and a sis­ter, Mar­jory Berkow­itz. Wil­bur Levin, who was appoin­ted Kings County clerk in Brook­lyn in 1989 after serving as chief exec­ut­ive of a bank, died in 2005.