Career
In 1945, she enlisted in the Women's Army Corps. Decades later, she founded the first feminist sex toy business in the United States, Eve"s Garden, in New York City in 1974. Eve"s Garden was the first woman-owned and woman-operated sex toy business in America.
As Williams put it, "Eve represented all women and the Garden was symbolic of women taking responsibility for their "own" sexuality."
She was inspired to found the business after she took a “Body/Sex Workshop” by Betty Dodson in New York and afterwards went to buy a Hitachi Magic Wand for use as a vibrator, but found that the salesboy at Macy"s asked her nosy questions about lieutenant
Williams was an actress for a time, and appeared in productions of The Vagina Monologues. In addition to this, she was a singer, artists’ model, and writer during the 1930s and 1940s, and was later one of the first successful female advertising executives in New York City.
In 2005, her memoir, Revolution in the Garden, was published. Some of her papers are held as the Dell Williams Papers in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Cornell University Library.
Williams died in Manhattan on March 11, 2015, aged 92.
The daughter of Isaac and Sarah (née Bronstein) Zetlin, Williams had been briefly married once, to Ted Willms, a variation of whose surname she retained professionally, although the marriage was annulled. She had no children and left no immediate survivors.
