Early Life
Pogrebin was born to an American Jewish family and grew up in Jamaica, New York. In 1952, she became one of the first girls to celebrate a bat mitzvah in Conservative Judaism. When her mother died of cancer in 1955, Pogrebin was prevented from saying the Kaddish, the traditional memorial prayer, because women were not counted in the minyan, the quorum of ten required for public prayer. She has retroactively traced her feminist awakening to this experience of exclusion at a moment of great personal anguish and vulnerability.
She graduated from Jamaica High School at age 16, and from Brandeis University at 19, earning a B.A. cum laude with Distinction in English and American Literature. In her first career in the book publishing business, she worked her way up to become Vice President at Bernard Geis Associates, a small New York publishing house where she was known for her creative promotion campaigns for authors such as Jacqueline Susann, Helen Gurley Brown, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, and Brendan Behan. She became an author herself and a full-time professional writer when her first book, How To Make It In A Man’s World was published in 1970 to rave reviews.
Read more about this topic: Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)