Lena Levine - Life, Views

Psychiatrist and gynaecologist, born in New York City, New York, USA. An early advocate in the 1920s and 1930s of family planning, she promoted sex education, egalitarian marriages, and contraception. A Freudian from the early 1940s, she counselled women in New York City and wrote widely on such subjects as menopause, frigidity, and sexual relations in marriage.

Lena ("Lee") Levine (May 17, 1903 – January 9, 1965) was an American psychiatrist and gynecologist. She was a pioneering figure in the development of both marriage counseling and birth control.She was a close colleague of Margaret Sanger. At the time of her death she was director of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau of New York and consulting gynecologist at the hygiene clinic of Brooklyn Jewish Hospital.

Among the views expressed in her writings a lectures were advocacy women's right to sexual enjoyment, free access to birth control, and frank discussion of sexual techniques. Her frank advocacy of sex education and her openly positive view of pre-marital sex have made her a target of sexual conservatives to this day.

Life

She was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. Levine were Russian Jews from Lithuania who immigrated to the United States in the 1890s.

Levine attended New York City Public Schools including Brooklyn's Girls High School;

She gave birth to two children. along with Len Fulton, at Dustbooks, in the 1970s and 1980s, Ellen edited and published directories of small presses that led to the definition of small presses as a well-defined sector of American and international publishing. Levine visited him regularly for the rest of her life.

Levine's husband, Louis Ferber died prematurely in 1942 of a heart attack. Her housekeeper, Pearl Harrison, helped raise Ellen, and remained with the family until Levine died.

Levine's interest in birth control dated from the 1920s, when she had met Margaret Sanger. In the 1930s she worked for the Birth Control Federation of America (later Planned Parenthood Federation of America and became medical secretary of the International Planned Parenthood Federation based in London, and worked at the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, where she became the assistant director under Abraham Stone.

At the time she was becoming a psychoanalyst, she was already involved in marriage counseling. She was in a practice with Hannah and Abraham Stone, authors of A Marriage Manual (1935). After Hannah's 1941 death, Levine and Abraham Stone organized the first U.S. group counseling program on sex and contraception, under the sponsorship of Planned Parenthood. She later went on to run group therapy sessions for sexual problems and, according to Brody, "ran a consultant bureau for pregnant women." Sicherman and Green in Notable American Women say more straightforwardly that the Special Consultation Bureau included abortion referrals, illegal at the time.

An author and lecturer, who made quite a few appearances on American television and radio, her works included five books on marriage and sex problems (some of them with co-authors) and many pamphlets and papers on women's medical and psychological problems, both for lay and professional audiences.

Politically, she was an ardent New Dealer; In 1964, she was one of the 100 women invited by then-Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver for a conference on Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty program.

Views

Within the world of psychoanalysis, Levine was a mildly dissenting Freudian. on the other:

Because Freud was a product of a heavily patriarchal society, his allegation that the castration complex and penis envy are inevitable seemed to have more foundation in his own time than it does now.

Levine lived through the early portion of the sexual revolution, died just as second-wave feminism was getting under way, and did not live to see heteronormativity called into question.

The fundamental fact about woman is that she is a female person.

While she wrote, "The emotional differences between men and women are largely created by society not anatomy.", she defended the more "emotional", "intuitive", "warmhearted" female personality: the changing role of women and the decline of patriarchy "does not mean that [woman] must try to acquire [male] feelings."

She believed in the importance both of being honest to oneself about one's feelings and of controlling their expression: "reasonable restraint" rather than "complete suppression" of one's feelings.

Levine was very open in terms of what sexual acts may be appropriate within a marriage—"Because mutual sexual desire in marriage is so enjoyable, anything that furthers it is worth trying and anything that blocks it should be avoided. … Any and every form of stimulation which can arouse desire in the partner who does not have it when the other does should be used,"—but considered that a marriage based on "mature love" should be a universal goal: "A single woman, her family, and her friends may give many reasons why she never married … [b]ut under scrutiny they turn out to be excuses…" "Most women have always known that their most important role as adults would be that of wife and mother."

In traditional marriage, she wrote, two people become "'man and wife'… The man remains a man; … [H]e is still a person, but she is mainly a role."As the role of woman in marriage was evolving from that of a "helpmeet" to that of a "partner", she believed that women's new role was still a matter of some contention.

Levine wrote that "…the emergence of women as sex partners with equal desire has led more and more women to follow the male pattern of sexual behavior," and called for a greater symmetry of expectations; Still, she very much saw marriage as the proper locus for sexuality: "Consummation when the emotions are not engaged is a lonely pleasure…", "Infidelity never solved a marriage problem yet…" She perceived an increase in non-marital sex in her time, and saw it almost entirely as a harmless prelude to marriage.

Her views on homosexuality were not censorious, but were still a far cry from those of second-wave feminism a few years later. Estimating Lesbians at "perhaps 2 percent of the population", she wrote, "[T]here are women who live in a homosexual relationship with another woman and are quite content with it. The emotional sex: why women are the way they are today, with David Goldsmith Loth. Morrow, 1964. "Lena Levine Dies; Marriage Adviser Was Active in Planned Parenthood", New York Times, Jan 11, 1965. p. Seymour "Sy" Brody, Lena Levine, originally in Jewish Heroes & ^ "'Checkup on Marriage' Urged by Psychiatrist", New York Times, Feb 6, 1960. p. ^ See, for example, Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood, In Her Own Words, on the site of Diane Dew, which quotes Levine: "... "LEVINE, Lena" in Sicherman, Barbara and Green, Carol Hurd, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (1980), Belknap Press. p. ^ Unknown Diversity: Small Presses and Little Magazines in the West, 1960–1980. ^ See, for example, Archival Television and Audio, Inc. (accessed 9 April 2006), which lists as #628 and #688 two appearances on the Les Crane Show on the topic of "The Frigid Wife". ^ Ernest Gräfenberg, M.D., The Role of Urethra in Female Orgasm, originally published 1950 in the International Journal of Sexology. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. seq. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p. ^ Levine, 1964, p.