Barbara Ehrenreich | |
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 Ehrenreich in 2006 | |
| Born | Barbara Alexander (1941-08-26)August 26, 1941 Butte, Montana, U.S. |
| Died | September 1, 2022(2022-09-01) (aged 81) Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. |
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| Education | |
| Genre | Nonfiction, investigative journalism |
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| Website | |
| barbaraehrenreich | |
Barbara Ehrenreich (/ˈɛərənraɪk/,AIR-ən-rike;[1]née Alexander; August 26, 1941 – September 1, 2022) was an American author andpolitical activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in theDemocratic 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 bookNickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series ofminimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of aLannan Literary Award and theErasmus Prize.
Ehrenreich was born to Isabelle (née Oxley) and Ben Howes Alexander inButte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town".[2] In an interview onC-SPAN, she characterized her parents as "strong union people" with two family rules: "nevercross a picket line and never vote Republican".[3] In a talk she gave in 1999, Ehrenreich called herself a "fourth-generation atheist".[4] Later in life, she wrote that she rejected "the God of monotheism" because ofthe philosophical problem of a being that was all good and all powerful, when people were living with "all the misery he allowed or instigated".[5] She hadmystical experiences throughout her life, which she identified as belonging to a typeanimism rather thantheism.[5]
"As a little girl", she toldThe 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 theWeekly Reader, just because my mother was a liberal Democrat who would always talk about racial injustice."[6] Her mother was a deeply unhappyhomemaker.[7] Her father was acopper miner who went to theMontana School of Mines (renamed Montana Technological University in 2018[8]) and then toCarnegie Mellon University. Ahigh-functioning alcoholic,[7] he strongly valued intelligence.[7]
After her father graduated from the Montana School of Mines, the family moved toPittsburgh,New York, andMassachusetts, before settling down inLos Angeles.[9] He eventually became a senior executive at theGillette Corporation. Her parents later divorced.[7]
Ehrenreich studiedphysics atReed College, switched tochemistry, graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis wasElectrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode. In 1968, she enrolled in atheoretical physicsPh.D, but changed early on tocellular immunology and received her Ph.D atRockefeller University.[9][10]
In 1970, Ehrenreich gave birth to her daughterRosa 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 toldThe 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."[11]
After completing her doctorate, Ehrenreich did not pursue a career in science. Instead, she worked first as an analyst with theBureau of the Budget in New York City and with the Health Policy Advisory Center, and later as an assistant professor at theState University of New York at Old Westbury.
In 1972, Ehrenreich began co-teaching a course on women and health with feminist journalist and academicDeirdre 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 aboutsocialist feminism and about feminism in general.[12]
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 inThe New York Times Book Review,The Washington Post,The Atlantic Monthly,Mother Jones,The Nation,The New Republic, theLos Angeles Times Book Review supplement,Vogue,Salon.com,TV Guide,Mirabella andAmerican Film. Her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared inHarper'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, theNew Statesman,In These Times,The Progressive,Working Woman, andZ Magazine.[12]
Ehrenreich served as founder, advisor or board member to a number of organizations including theNational Women's Health Network, theNational Abortion Rights Action League, the National Mental Health Consumers' Self-Help Clearinghouse, the Nationwide Women's Program of theAmerican Friends Service Committee, theBrooklyn-based Association for Union Democracy, theBoehm Foundation, the Women's Committee of 100, theNational Writers Union, the Progressive Media Project,FAIR's advisory committee on women in the media, theNational Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and theCampaign for America's Future.[12]
Between 1979 and 1981, she served as an adjunct associate professor atNew York University and as a visiting professor at theUniversity of Missouri at Columbia and atSangamon State University (Now University of Illinois, Springfield.) She lectured at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara, was a writer-in-residence at theOhio State University,Wayne Morse chair at theUniversity of Oregon, and a teaching fellow at the graduate school of journalism at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. She was a fellow at theNew York Institute for the Humanities, theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, theInstitute for Policy Studies, and the New York-based Society of American Historians.[12]
In 2000, Ehrenreich endorsed thepresidential campaign of Ralph Nader; in 2004, she urged voters to supportJohn Kerry in theswing states.[13]
In February 2008, she expressed support for then-SenatorBarack Obama in the2008 U.S. presidential campaign.[14]
In 2001, Ehrenreich published her seminal work,Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Seeking to explore whether people can subsist onminimum wage in the United States, she worked "undercover" in a series of minimum-wage jobs, such as waitress, housekeeper, andWal-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 admirers regard the book as "a classic of social justice literature."[15]Ehrenreich founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with one main purpose: support immersive reporting on the working poor, in the manner of Ehrenreich's ownNickel and Dimed.[16]
Filling in for a vacationingThomas Friedman as a columnist withThe New York Times in 2004, Ehrenreich wrote about how, in the fight for women'sreproductive 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".[17]
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."[18]
In 2005,The New Yorker called her "a veteranmuckraker".[19]
In 2006, she founded United Professionals, an organization described as "a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization forwhite-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."[20]
In 2009, she wroteBright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (published in the UK asSmile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World), which investigated the rise of thepositive thinking industry in the United States. She included her own experience after being told that she hadbreast cancer as a starting point in the book.[21] In this book, she brought to light various methods of what Nobel physicistMurray Gell-Mann called "quantum flapdoodle".[22]
Beginning in 2013, Ehrenreich was an honorary co-chair of theDemocratic Socialists of America. She also served on theNORML board of directors, theInstitute for Policy Studies board of trustees and the editorial board ofThe Nation. She has served on the editorial boards ofSocial Policy,Ms.,Mother Jones,Seven Days,Lear's,The New Press, and Culturefront, and as a contributing editor toHarper's.[12]
In 1980, Ehrenreich shared theNational Magazine Award for excellence in reporting with colleagues atMother Jones magazine[23] for the cover storyThe Corporate Crime of the Century,[24] about "what happens after the U.S. government forces a dangerous drug, pesticide or other product off the domestic market, then the manufacturer sells that same product, frequently with the direct support of the State Department, throughout the rest of the world."[25]
In 1998 theAmerican Humanist Association named her "Humanist of the Year".[26]
In 2000, she received theSidney Hillman Award for journalism for theHarper's article "Nickel and Dimed", which was later published as a chapter in her book of the same title.[27]
In 2002, she won a National Magazine Award for her essay "Welcome to Cancerland: A mammogram leads to a cult of pink kitsch", which describes Ehrenreich's own experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer, and describes what she calls the "breast cancer cult," which "serves as an accomplice in global poisoning – normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience."[28][29]
In 2004, she received thePuffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship,[30] awarded jointly by thePuffin Foundation of New Jersey andThe Nation Institute to an American who challenges the status quo "through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance".[31]
In 2007, she received the"Freedom from Want" Medal, awarded by theRoosevelt Institute in celebration of "those whose life's work embodies FDR's Four Freedoms".[32]
Ehrenreich received aFord Foundation award for humanistic perspectives on contemporary society (1982), aGuggenheim Fellowship (1987–88) and a grant for research and writing from theJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1995). She received honorary degrees from Reed College, the State University of New York at Old Westbury, the College of Wooster in Ohio, John Jay College, UMass Lowell and La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.[24]
In November 2018, Ehrenreich received theErasmus Prize by KingWillem-Alexander of the Netherlands for her work in investigative journalism.[33]
Ehrenreich had one brother, Ben Alexander Jr., and one sister, Diane Alexander. When she was 35, according to the bookAlways Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents, her mother died "from a likely suicide".[34] Her father died years later fromAlzheimer's disease.[34]
Ehrenreich was married and divorced twice. She met her first husband,John Ehrenreich, during ananti-war activism campaign inNew York City, and they married in 1966. He is aclinical psychologist,[35] and they co-wrote several books abouthealth policy and labor issues before divorcing in 1977. In 1983, she married Gary Stevenson, aunion organizer for theTeamsters.[6] She divorced Stevenson in 1993.[12]
Ehrenreich had two children with her first husband. Her daughterRosa, born in 1970, was named after a great-grandmother andRosa Luxemburg.[36] She is a Virginia-based law professor,national security andforeign policy expert and writer.[37] Ehrenreich's sonBen, born in 1972, is a novelist and a journalist inLos Angeles.[38]
Ehrenreich was diagnosed withbreast cancer shortly after the release of her bookNickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. This led to the award-winning article "Welcome to Cancerland," published in the November 2001 issue ofHarper's Magazine. The piece inspired the 2011 documentaryPink Ribbons, Inc.[39]
Ehrenreich lived inAlexandria, Virginia,[40] where she died at a hospice facility on September 1, 2022, from a stroke, six days after her 81st birthday.[15] HerNew York Times obituary called her an "Explorer of Prosperity's Dark Side" for her commentary ofinequality in the United States.[41]
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..
