Lena Levine

Politically, she was an ardent New Dealer; Sicherman and Green describe her as "sympathetic as well to socialist ideas." 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.

Levine's husband, Louis Ferber died prematurely in 1942 of a heart attack. With her husband's death and her son's retardation, she gave up obstetrics, at least in part because, as a single mother, she did not want to have to deal with the need to run off suddenly to attend to births. Her housekeeper, Pearl Harrison, helped raise Ellen, and remained with the family until Levine died. Her interests also turned at this time to Freudian psychotherapy. She underwent analysis with Sándor Radó and opened a private practice at 30 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan while continuing her gynecological practice in Brooklyn, where she lived; she would eventually move to a brownstone in Greenwich Village and consolidate her practice.

She gave birth to two children. Ellen (born 1939) would eventually become an academic and small press publisher; 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. Michael (born 1942), had a severe viral encephalitis as an infant, which left him mentally retarded; from the age of five he was institutionalized; Levine visited him regularly for the rest of her life.

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.

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.

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. Sicherman and Green say that she was "probably more prominent as an international advocate for birth control than she was in the United States."

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.

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.