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 in 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 titled 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 admirers regard the book as "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 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, and Culturefront, and as a contributing editor to Harper's.
Books
Nonfiction
(with John Ehrenreich)
(with John Ehrenreich and Health PAC)
(with Deirdre English)
(with Deirdre English)
(with Deirdre English)
(with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs)
(with Fred L. Block, Richard A. Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven)
(ed., with Arlie Hochschild)
(UK: Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World)
Fiction
Essays
"The Charge: Gynocide", investigative journalism about the Dalkon Shield in the third world, Mother Jones, November/December issue, 1979
"Making Sense of La Difference", Time, 1992
"Burt, Loni and Our Way of Life", Time, September 20, 1993
"In Defense of Talk Shows", Time, December 4, 1995
"The New Creationism: Biology Under Attack" The Nation, June 9, 1997
", Time, January 31, 2000
"Welcome to Cancerland", 2001 National Magazine Award finalist
"A New Counterterrorism Strategy: Feminism", AlterNet, 2005
"Fight for Your Right to Party" Time, December 18, 2006
, The Guardian, February 22, 2009
"Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?", The New York Times, August 9, 2009
"Are Women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?", Guernica, October 13, 2009
"Smile! You've got cancer", The Guardian, January 2, 2010
Death of a Yuppie Dream – The Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class February 12, 2013.
Awards
In 1980, Ehrenreich shared the National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting with colleagues at Mother Jones magazine for the cover story The Corporate Crime of the Century, 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."
In 1998 the American Humanist Association named her "Humanist of the Year".
In 2000, she received the Sidney Hillman Award for journalism for the Harper's article "Nickel and Dimed," which was later published as a chapter in her book of the same title.
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."
In 2004, she received the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship, awarded jointly by the Puffin Foundation of New Jersey and The Nation Institute to an American who challenges the status quo "through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance".
In 2007, she received the "Freedom from Want" Medal, awarded by the Roosevelt Institute in celebration of "those whose life's work embodies FDR's Four Freedoms".
Ehrenreich received a Ford Foundation award for humanistic perspectives on contemporary society (1982), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987–88) and a grant for research and writing from the John 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.
In November 2018, Ehrenreich received the Erasmus Prize by King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands for her work in investigative journalism.
Personal life and family
Ehrenreich had one brother, Ben Alexander Jr., and one sister, Diane Alexander. When she was 35, according to the book Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents, her mother died "from a likely suicide". Her father died years later from Alzheimer's disease.
Ehrenreich was married and divorced twice. She met her first husband, John Ehrenreich, during an anti-war activism campaign in New York City, and they married in 1966. He is a clinical psychologist, and they co-wrote several books about health policy and labor issues before divorcing in 1977. In 1983, she married Gary Stevenson, a union organizer for the Teamsters. She divorced Stevenson in 1993.
Ehrenreich had two children with her first husband. Her daughter Rosa, born in 1970, was named after a great-grandmother and Rosa Luxemburg. She is a Virginia-based law professor, national security and foreign policy expert and writer. Ehrenreich's son Ben, born in 1972, is a novelist and a journalist in Los Angeles.
Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the release of her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. This led to the award-winning article "Welcome to Cancerland," published in the November 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine. The piece inspired the 2011 documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc..
Ehrenreich lived in Alexandria, Virginia, where she died at a hospice facility on September 1, 2022, from a stroke, six days after her 81st birthday. Her New York Times obituary called her an "Explorer of Prosperity's Dark Side" for her commentary of inequality in the United States.
References
External links
Barbara Ehrenreich's blog
Interview with Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker, March 21, 2020.
Papers of Barbara Ehrenreich, 1922–2007 (inclusive), 1963–2007 (bulk). Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
1941 births
2022 deaths
American anti-war activists
American bloggers
American columnists
American women bloggers
American women columnists
American women historians
20th-century American novelists
21st-century American historians
American humanists
American political writers
American relationships and sexuality writers
American anti-poverty advocates
Feminist studies scholars
Members of the Democratic Socialists of America from Virginia
People from Butte, Montana
Reed College alumni
American socialist feminists
American workers' rights activists
American atheists
American abortion-rights activists
Rockefeller University alumni
American women essayists
American women novelists
20th-century American women writers
Journalists from Montana
Montana socialists
American immunologists
American women biologists
Critics of postmodernism
21st-century American essayists
Recipients of the Four Freedoms Award
New American Movement
21st-century American women writers
Neurological disease deaths in Virginia
Writers from Alexandria, Virginia
Journalists from Alexandria, Virginia
Writers from Montana
Non-interventionism
University of Illinois at Springfield faculty