The youngest of seven in Brooklyn
Lena Levine was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 17, 1903, the youngest of seven children of Sophie and Morris H. Levine, Jewish immigrants from Vilna in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, who had come to America in the 1890s. Her father was a successful clothing manufacturer, and she grew up in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighbourhood.
She was educated in the city’s public schools, including Girls High School in Brooklyn. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Hunter College in 1923 and her medical degree from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1927, at a time when few women became doctors. She married a fellow medical student, Louis Ferber, and both did their residencies at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. Unusually for the era, she always practised under her own name.
A doctor for women
Levine set up a private practice in obstetrics and gynecology in Brooklyn, while her husband became a general practitioner. Her interest in birth control went back to the 1920s, when she met Margaret Sanger, the nurse who had opened America’s first birth control clinic and was campaigning to make contraception legal and available. In the 1930s Levine worked for the Birth Control Federation of America, the organisation that in 1942 became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Her family life brought heavy blows. A daughter, Ellen, was born in 1939. A son, Michael, born three years later, developed viral encephalitis as an infant and was left with severe intellectual disability; from the age of five he lived in an institution, and she visited him regularly for the rest of her life. Then her husband died suddenly of a heart attack. As a single mother she could no longer answer the unpredictable calls of obstetrics, so she gave up delivering babies.
From gynecology to the mind
Instead she turned to psychiatry. She studied psychoanalysis with Sándor Radó at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute and opened a psychiatric practice at 30 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, while keeping a gynecological practice in Brooklyn. She later moved to a brownstone in Greenwich Village. Her housekeeper, Pearl Harrison, helped raise her daughter and stayed with the family until Levine’s death.
The combination of gynecology and psychiatry was rare and proved powerful. Many of the problems women brought to doctors in the 1940s and 1950s, from fear of pregnancy to infertility to unhappiness in marriage, were at once physical and emotional, and Levine could treat both.
At Margaret Sanger’s clinic
Levine’s main professional home became the clinic Sanger had founded in New York in 1923. The Clinical Research Bureau, renamed the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1940, was the first legal birth control clinic in the United States and grew into a leading centre for contraceptive research. Over five decades it provided birth control and infertility care to thousands of patients and trained doctors, nurses and medical students from around the world.
Levine worked alongside the physicians Hannah and Abraham Stone, pioneers of birth control and marriage counselling and authors of the widely read A Marriage Manual. After Hannah Stone’s death in 1941, Abraham Stone expanded the bureau’s work on infertility, opening a Fertility Service in 1945 for couples who wanted children but could not have them, and enlarging its Marriage Consultation Service. Levine became assistant director under Stone, and together they built an international reputation for treating a wide range of sexual and reproductive problems, including infertility. With Stone she organised the first group counselling programme in the United States on sex and contraception, sponsored by Planned Parenthood, and she later ran group therapy sessions for sexual problems. At the time of her death she was director of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau and consulting gynecologist at the hygiene clinic of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital.
Taking family planning to the world
After the Second World War, Sanger and her allies set out to build an international movement. At a congress in Cheltenham, England, in 1948, Sanger proposed an international committee on planned parenthood, and in November 1952, at a conference in Bombay, that committee became the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The IPPF set out to create family planning associations in country after country, to spread information on birth control and sex education, and to support research into cheaper, simpler contraceptives, including the birth control pill. Even before 1952 the provisional committee, of which the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau was one of five member organisations, had established contacts with family planning groups in more than twenty countries, supplying clinics and doctors with information and contraceptive supplies and helping to test contraceptive methods in Madras and Bombay in India and in the British West Indies. By 1961 the federation had thirty-two member associations in four regions.
The Jewish Women’s Archive credits Levine, with Abraham Stone and Sanger, as a founder of the IPPF. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project lists her on the council and executive committee of the federation’s Western Hemisphere Region, and she served as a medical secretary of the IPPF. She travelled and lectured widely. Her biographers in Notable American Women judged that she was probably more prominent as an international advocate for birth control than she was in the United States. The federation she helped launch grew from eight national associations in 1952 into a worldwide network that today provides sexual and reproductive health services in well over a hundred countries.
Frank talk for a buttoned-up age
Levine was also a popular author and broadcaster at a time when sex was rarely discussed in public. She wrote five books on marriage and sexual problems, some with co-authors, as well as many pamphlets and papers for both doctors and general readers. They included The Doctor Talks with the Bride, a Planned Parenthood pamphlet in print by 1938; The Menopause (1952), with Beka Doherty; The Premarital Consultation (1956), a manual for physicians written with Abraham Stone; The Modern Book of Marriage (1957); and, with David Loth, The Frigid Wife (1962) and The Emotional Sex (1964). She appeared often on American radio and television.
Her message was that women had a right to sexual fulfilment, to free access to birth control and to equality within marriage. She proposed an annual check-up on marriage, like a medical check-up. She argued that the emotional differences between men and women are largely created by society, not anatomy, and she wrote critically of the traditional idea that in marriage the man remains a person while the woman becomes mainly a role. Some of her views, like those of most writers of her time, reflected the assumptions of the 1950s, but her insistence on frank, accurate information was ahead of her era.
A modern Freudian
Within psychoanalysis Levine was a mildly dissenting Freudian. She admired Freud, writing that his great contributions seemed greater the more later scholars built upon them, but she argued that his claims about penis envy and the castration complex reflected the heavily patriarchal society he lived in, and that later researchers described personality in terms of emotional security and maturity rather than libidinal satisfaction. “Femaleness is a biological fact,” she wrote. “Femininity is a term whose meaning, defined by society, is constantly changing. It is time to scrap it.”
Her advice was practical and humane. She urged people to be honest with themselves about their feelings while practising reasonable restraint rather than complete suppression, and she explained it in a mother’s terms: you can tell a child you know how angry she is at her baby sister, while insisting she must not hurt her. She was suspicious of the clichés of romantic love, which she called pseudo-love, and she asked why, if a wife was expected to forgive a husband’s infidelity, he should not be expected to forgive hers. On homosexuality she was, for her time, notably uncensorious, writing that women living contentedly in relationships with other women, like gay men, simply wanted to be let alone. Her clinical writing was cited by the gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg in his original paper on female sexual response.
A Jewish daughter of Brownsville
Levine was a child of the great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, raised in Brownsville and educated in the free public institutions, Hunter College among them, that opened the professions to the daughters of immigrants. She trained and worked for years at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and remained a consultant there to the end of her life. Politically she was an ardent New Dealer, and in 1964 she was one of a hundred women invited by Sargent Shriver to a conference on President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programme.
Death and legacy
Lena Levine died of a stroke in New York City on January 9, 1965, at the age of 61. Her daughter, Ellen, became an academic and a small-press publisher.
Levine’s legacy lives in services most people now take for granted. Birth control advice from a doctor, treatment for couples struggling to conceive, premarital and marriage counselling, and frank sex education all had to be invented, defended and taught, and the Sanger bureau where she worked was one of the places where that happened. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, which she helped bring into being, still works to make family planning available to women and families around the world.
Sources & further reading
Lena Levine, Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia (by Ellen Chesler) · Lena Levine, Wikipedia · Birth Control Organizations: International Planned Parenthood Federation, Margaret Sanger Papers Project, New York University · Birth Control Organizations: International Committee on Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger Papers Project, New York University · Clinical Research Bureau, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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