Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich (, ; ; August 26, 1941 – September 1, 2022) was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book '' Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America'', a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.

Early life

Ehrenreich was born to Isabelle ( Oxley) and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town". In an interview on C-SPAN, she characterized her parents as "strong union people" with two family rules: "never cross a picket line and never vote Republican". In a talk she gave in 1999, Ehrenreich called herself a "fourth-generation atheist".

"As a little girl", she told ''The New York Times'' in 1993, "I would go to school and have to decide if my parents were the evil people they were talking about, part of the Red Menace we read about in the ''Weekly Reader'', just because my mother was a liberal Democrat who would always talk about racial injustice." Her father was a copper miner who went to the Montana School of Mines (renamed Montana Technological University since 2018) and then to Carnegie Mellon University.
After her father graduated from the Montana School of Mines, the family moved to Pittsburgh, New York, and Massachusetts, before settling down in Los Angeles. He eventually became a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation. Her parents later divorced.

Ehrenreich originally studied physics at Reed College, later changing to chemistry and graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis was entitled ''Electrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode''. In 1968, she started a Ph.D program for theoretical physics, but changed early on to cellular immunology and received her Ph.D at Rockefeller University.

In 1970, Ehrenreich gave birth to her daughter Rosa in a public clinic in New York. "I was the only white patient at the clinic, and I found out this was the health care women got," she told ''The Globe and Mail'' newspaper in 1987, "They induced my labor because it was late in the evening and the doctor wanted to go home. I was enraged. The experience made me a feminist."

Career

After completing her doctorate, Ehrenreich did not pursue a career in science. Instead, she worked first as an analyst with the Bureau of the Budget in New York City and with the Health Policy Advisory Center, and later as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.

In 1972, Ehrenreich began co-teaching a course on women and health with feminist journalist and academic Deirdre English. Through the rest of the seventies, Ehrenreich worked mostly in health-related research, advocacy and activism, including co-writing, with English, several feminist books and pamphlets on the history and politics of women's health. During this period she began speaking frequently at conferences staged by women's health centers and women's groups, by universities, and by the United States government. She also spoke regularly about socialist feminism and about feminism in general.

Throughout her career, Ehrenreich worked as a freelance writer. She is arguably best known for her non-fiction reportage, book reviews and social commentary. Her reviews have appeared in ''The New York Times Book Review'', ''The Washington Post'', ''The Atlantic Monthly'', ''Mother Jones'', ''The Nation'', ''The New Republic'', the ''Los Angeles Times'' Book Review supplement, ''Vogue'', Salon.com, ''TV Guide'', ''Mirabella'' and ''American Film''. Her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared in ''Harper's Magazine'', ''The New York Times'', ''The New York Times Magazine'', ''Time'', ''The Wall Street Journal'', ''Life'', ''Mother Jones'', ''Ms.'', ''The Nation'', ''The New Republic'', the ''New Statesman'', ''In These Times'', ''The Progressive'', ''Working Woman'', and ''Z Magazine''.

Ehrenreich served as founder, advisor or board member to a number of organizations including the National Women's Health Network, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the National Mental Health Consumers' Self-Help Clearinghouse, the Nationwide Women's Program of the American Friends Service Committee, the Brooklyn-based Association for Union Democracy, the Boehm Foundation, the Women's Committee of 100, the National Writers Union, the Progressive Media Project, FAIR's advisory committee on women in the media, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and the Campaign for America's Future.

Between 1979 and 1981, she served as an adjunct associate professor at New York University and as a visiting professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia and at Sangamon State University (Now University of Illinois, Springfield.) She lectured at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was a writer-in-residence at the Ohio State University, Wayne Morse chair at the University of Oregon, and a teaching fellow at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the New York-based Society of American Historians.

In 2000, Ehrenreich endorsed the presidential campaign of Ralph Nader; in 2004, she urged voters to support John Kerry in the swing states.

In February 2008, she expressed support for then-Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.

In 2001, Ehrenreich published her seminal work, '' Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America''. Seeking to explore whether people can subsist on minimum wage in the United States, she worked "undercover" in a series of minimum-wage jobs, such as waitress, housekeeper, and Wal-Mart associate, and reported on her efforts to pay living expenses with the low wages paid by those jobs (an average of $7 per hour). She concluded that it was impossible to pay for food and rent without working at least two such jobs. ''Nickel and Dimed'' became a bestseller and a classic of social justice literature.
Ehrenreich founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with one main purpose: support immersive reporting on the working poor, in the manner of Ehrenreich's own classic book ''Nickel and Dimed''.

Filling in for a vacationing Thomas Friedman as a columnist with ''The New York Times'' in 2004, Ehrenreich wrote about how, in the fight for women's reproductive rights, "it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me" and said that she herself "had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years".

In her 1990 book of essays, ''The Worst Years of Our Lives'', she wrote that "the one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks."

In 2005, ''The New Yorker'' called her "a veteran muckraker".

In 2006, she founded United Professionals, an organization described as "a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization for white-collar workers, regardless of profession or employment status. We reach out to all unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed workers—people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control."

In 2009, she wrote ''Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America'', which investigated the rise of the positive thinking industry in the United States. She included her own experience after being told that she had breast cancer as a starting point in the book. In this book, she brought to light various methods of what Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann called "quantum flapdoodle".

Beginning in 2013, Ehrenreich was an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She also served on the NORML board of directors, the Institute for Policy Studies board of trustees and the editorial board of ''The Nation''. She has served on the editorial boards of ''Social Policy'', ''Ms.'', ''Mother Jones'', '' Seven Days'', '' Lear's'', ''The New Press

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