CREDIT:Sigrid Estrada
BARBARA EHRENREICH’S father had Alzheimer’s disease, but his political memory remained sharp. During the mental assessment performed by a neurologist, he was asked the name of the president of the United States. As Ehrenreich wrote in her book The Worst Years of Our Lives, “His blue eyes would widen incredulously, surprised at the neurologist’s ignorance, then he would snort in majestic indignation, ‘Reagan, that dumb son of a bitch.’”
That same caustic irreverence marks Ehrenreich’s many books of social commentary. A Ph.D. biologist, feminist, and socialist, Ehrenreich inherited her parents’ working-class pride and suspicion of powerful elites. Since the 1980s, Ehrenreich has produced a stream of articles and books, including the best-selling Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) about the working poor. More than any other contemporary writer, she has balanced writing for progressive publications, such as The Nation, The Progressive, Ms., and Mother Jones, and for mass-circulation mainstream publications, such as Time, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, the Guardian in London, Vogue, Esquire, and the New York Times. Her wit, biting sarcasm, and underlying idealism make it easy for mainstream readers to accept, or at least take seriously, Ehrenreich’s radical views on the economy, unions, women’s rights, big business, and politics. Indeed, she makes radical ideas sound like common sense.
Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, to a third-generation copper miner. Her mother, a homemaker, also came from a mining family. Both sides of her family were Scottish and Irish Americans, religious skeptics, and die-hard Democrats.
Ehrenreich’s mother taught her children two primary lessons: never vote Republican and never cross a picket line. As an alternate delegate to the Democratic Party convention in 1964, her mother joined the protest by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that tried to unseat that state’s segregated delegation.
During Ehrenreich’s childhood, her father pursued his education, graduated from college, became a corporate executive, and moved the family frequently for his work—from Montana to Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and finally California, to Los Angeles.
Ehrenreich graduated from Reed College in Oregon in 1963 with a major in physical chemistry. She earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University in 1968. While in graduate school she married John Ehrenreich, and the couple had two children.
As she became immersed in the antiwar movement, the life of a scientist seemed less appealing than that of an activist. In 1969 she went to work for a small nonprofit organization, the Health Policy Advisory Center, which advocated for better health care for low-income people. She enjoyed writing investigative pieces for the organization’s monthly newsletter. She helped write The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (1971), an exposé in the tradition of muckrakers Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and Ida Tarbell.
The birth of her first child in 1970 changed Ehrenreich’s self-awareness. “The prenatal care I received at a hospital clinic,” she recalled, “showed me that PhD’s were not immune from the vilest forms of sexism.” In the early 1970s, Ehrenreich’s expertise in health care issues merged with her feminism. She became one of the founders of the women’s health movement. She wrote many articles and several books, including Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (1977) and For Her Own Good: One Hundred Fifty Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (1989), and helped popularize the idea that the health care system controls women’s choices by mystifying the alleged expertise of (mostly male) physicians.
Ehrenreich has written eighteen books, many of them controversial, on topics ranging from women workers around the globe (Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, 2004) to men’s lack of commitment (The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, 1987), the origins of war and humanity’s attraction to violence (Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, 1997), the human impulse for communal celebration (Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, 2007) and, after getting breast cancer, a critique of the “think positive” movement in popular psychology, religion, and health (Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, 2009).
In 1998 she began her most ambitious and best-known writing project, a book—Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America—on low-wage workers, based on her own experiences “passing” as one of them.
The working poor were not an alien species, as she noted in the book’s introduction. Her sister had gone from one low-wage job to another—phone company representative, factory worker, receptionist—and Ehrenreich’s ex-husband had been a $4.50 an hour warehouse worker before snagging an organizing job with the Teamsters union.
Ehrenreich set certain rules for herself: no relying on her education or writing skills to land a job, take the highest-paid job offered her, and find the cheapest accommodations she could. Her goal was not only to experience poverty but also to do the math: as a low-wage worker, could she actually make ends meet?
The project took her to Key West, Florida, where she waited tables; to Portland, Maine, where she toiled as a dietary aide in a nursing home and a maid for a cleaning service; and to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she worked as a clerk for Walmart. She encountered a surprising reality. “You might think that unskilled jobs would be a snap for someone who holds a Ph.D. and whose normal line of work requires learning entirely new things every couple of weeks. Not so. The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’”
She also earned about half a living wage, and she could not imagine supporting children or paying for medical expenses on the $7 an hour or so she earned. And, she added,
what surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and self respect. I learned this at the very beginning of my stint as a waitress, when I was warned that my purse could be searched by management at any time. I wasn’t carrying stolen salt shakers or anything else of a compromising nature, but still, there’s something about the prospect of a purse search that makes a woman feel a few buttons short of fully dressed.
The book came out in 2001 and struck a nerve. Five years earlier President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress had enacted so-called welfare reform, restricting family assistance for women and children and pushing many former welfare recipients into the labor market. After a few years, many economists and politicians celebrated the plan as a huge success, pointing to a dramatic decline in the relief rolls. But others noted that although the number of people on welfare had shrunk, welfare reform had not done much to reduce the poverty rate because so many of them ended up in dead-end low-wage jobs, usually without health insurance, leaving them worse off than before.
The book resonated with the nation’s changing mood about inequality and poverty. Polls revealed that a vast majority of Americans wanted to raise the federal minimum wage. Local campaigns for living-wage laws and growing protests against Walmart (the nation’s largest employer of low-wage workers) also reflected the changing tide of public opinion that Nickel and Dimed tapped and helped shape.
Nickel and Dimed sold more than 1.5 million copies. Many colleges assigned the book in classes. A small but vocal group raised objections. In July 2003, conservatives in North Carolina purchased a full-page ad in the Raleigh News and Observer complaining that students at the University of North Carolina were required to read “a classic Marxist rant” that “mounts an all-out assault on Christians, conservatives and capitalism.” But other faculty, students, and politicians used the book to lobby for an increase in the minimum wage.
As late as 2010, Nickel and Dimed still made the American Library Association’s annual list of the top-ten most frequently challenged books—books that some Americans sought to keep off library shelves and school reading lists.
In 2008 Ehrenreich published This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation about the widening gap between the nation’s rich and everyone else. The following year, as the recession deepened, triggering an epidemic of layoffs and foreclosures, Ehrenreich wrote a series of four articles for the New York Times—“Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?,” “The Recession’s Racial Divide,” “Too Poor to Make the News,” and “A Homespun Safety Net”—documenting and describing the plight of the poor, not only the downwardly mobile middle class but the people and families who had been poor before the downturn and for whom conditions had gotten even worse.
Like Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Carey McWilliams, and Michael Harrington before her, Ehrenreich dares to remind the country about the reality of poverty in its midst.
In her books, columns, and speeches, she directs her audiences to grassroots community organizations, unions, and women’s groups that are fighting for social justice. She has been arrested at a rally in support of Yale’s blue-collar workers, joined picket lines with hotel workers and janitors, distributed leaflets for living-wage campaigns, and protested in favor of women’s reproductive rights. On her Web site, Ehrenreich posts articles by activists describing their organizing campaigns. She has served as honorary cochair of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization founded by Michael Harrington.
“If we are serious about collective survival in the face of our multiple crises, we have to build organizations, including explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize this talent, develop leadership and advance local struggles,” Ehrenreich wrote in The Nation in March 2009. “And we have to be serious, because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited all trust or even respect, and we—progressives of all stripes—are now the only grown-ups around.”