[3] Her major interests included gender roles, rural life in modern Greece, and the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin.
Born in Hungary in 1920, Ernestine Friedl emigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of two years.
While in attendance at Hunter College, Friedl met three influential figures in her life: Dorothy L. Keur and Elsie Steedman, both professors of anthropology who taught and inspired Friedl to pursue the same field, as well as her future husband Harry Levy, who studied classics.
In 1942 and 1943, under the tutelage of Columbia professor Ralph Linton, Friedl studied the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin.
She had been awarded a Fulbright grant to study life in a Greek village Vasilika, a small agricultural town with a population of 216 people.