Lise Vogel grew up in New York City during the 1950s, the child of well-educated parents. Her father, of German-Jewish descent, was a doctor and her mother, of Russian-Jewish descent, held a college diploma. Nonetheless, her parents continually struggled to remain economically solvent as her father, who was prone to depressive states of melancholy, could never establish a successful medical practice. Also, the time of Vogel's childhood paralleled the McCarthy years. Because her parents had been involved in leftist politics since the 1930s, they worried about repression. Her mother, a member of the Communist Party, insisted that a collectivist society was necessary to institute peace, justice, and the end to racial oppression. Because of her parents' politics and their inability to maintain financial stability, Vogel never found a comfortable place within her middle-class existence. Vogel wrote in the introduction to Woman Questions: Essays for a Materialist Feminism (1995), "I...