Lena Levine

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. One of her concepts was "an annual checkup on marriage" comparable to a medical checkup. 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.

She was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. Her parents Sophie and Morris H. Levine were Russian Jews from Lithuania who immigrated to the United States in the 1890s. Morris was a successful clothing manufacturer.

Levine attended New York City Public Schools including Brooklyn's Girls High School; she received her A.B. degree from Hunter College (1923) and her M.D. from Bellevue Medical College (1927). She married fellow medical student Louis Ferber, who became a general practitioner while she became a gynecologist and obstetrician. Both did their residencies at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. She always used her maiden name professionally, somewhat unusual for the era. She then went on to study psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

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