Ehrenreich was born to Isabelle (née Oxley) and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town".[2] 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".[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 of the 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 had mystical experiences throughout her life, which she identified as belonging to a type animism rather than theism.[5]
"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."[6] Her mother was a deeply unhappy homemaker.[7] Her father was a copper miner who went to the Montana School of Mines (renamed Montana Technological University in 2018[8]) and then to Carnegie Mellon University. A high-functioning alcoholic,[7] he strongly valued intelligence.[7]
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."[11]
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.[12]
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."[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 own Nickel and Dimed.[16]
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".[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 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."[20]
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.[21] In this book, she brought to light various methods of what Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann called "quantum flapdoodle".[22]
Ehrenreich, Barbara; Ehrenreich, John (1969). Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad. Monthly Review Press. ISBN9780853450863. (with John Ehrenreich)
Ehrenreich, Barbara (1971). The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. ISBN9780394714530. (with John Ehrenreich and Health PAC)
Ehrenreich, Barbara; English, Deirdre (1972). Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Feminist Press. ISBN0912670134. (with Deirdre English)
Ehrenreich, Barbara; English, Deirdre (1973). Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. Feminist Press at CUNY. ISBN9781558616950. (with Deirdre English)
Ehrenreich, Barbara; English, Deirdre (1978). For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women. Anchor Press. ISBN9780385126502. (with Deirdre English)
Fuentes, Annette; Fuentes, Carlos; Ehrenreich, Barbara (1983). Women in the Global Factory. South End Press. ISBN9780896081987.
Ehrenreich, Barbara (1983). The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Anchor Press/Doubleday. ISBN9780385176149.
Ehrenreich, Barbara; Hess, Elizabeth; Jacobs, Gloria (1986). Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex. Anchor Press/Doubleday. ISBN9780385184984. (with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs)
Ehrenreich, Barbara; Hochschild, Arlie Russell (2003). Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Macmillan. ISBN9780805069952. (ed., with Arlie Hochschild)
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2018). Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. New York: Twelve. ISBN978-1-4789-6126-0. OCLC1039523821.
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2020). Had I Known: Collected Essays. Twelve. ISBN978-1-4555-4369-4.
Fiction
Ehrenreich, Barbara (1993). Kipper's Game. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. ISBN9780374181550.
In 1980, Ehrenreich shared the National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting with colleagues at Mother Jones magazine [23] for the cover story The 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 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.[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]
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.[24]
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".[34] Her father died years later from Alzheimer's disease.[34]
Ehrenreich had two children with her first husband. Her daughter Rosa, born in 1970, was named after a great-grandmother and Rosa Luxemburg.[36] She is a Virginia-based law professor, national security and foreign policy expert and writer.[37] Ehrenreich's son Ben, born in 1972, is a novelist and a journalist in Los Angeles.[38]
^ abEhrenreich, Barbara (2014). "Return to the Quest". Living with a wild God: a nonbeliever's search for the truth about everything (First ed.). New York: Twelve. ISBN978-1-4555-0176-2.
^ abcdEhrenreich, Barbara (2014). "Anomalous Oscillations". Living with a wild God: a nonbeliever's search for the truth about everything (First ed.). New York: Twelve. ISBN978-1-4555-0176-2.
^"About". Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Archived from the original on September 21, 2015.
^Ehrenreich, Barbara (July 22, 2004). "Owning Up To Abortion". The New York Times. Retrieved May 9, 2011.
^Andrews, Robert (1993). The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 3. ISBN9780231071949. 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..