Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreichis an American author and political activist who describes herself as "a myth buster by trade", and has been called "a veteran muckraker" by The New Yorker. During the 1980s and early 1990s she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. Ehrenreich is perhaps best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: OnGetting By in America. A memoir of Ehrenreich's...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 August 1941
CountryUnited States of America
As a general rule, when something gets elevated to apple-pie status in the hierarchy of American values, you have to suspect that its actual monetary value is skidding toward zero. Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent. Same thing with work: would we be so reverent about the 'work ethic' if it wasn't for the fact that the average working stiff's hourly pay is shrinking, year by year ...
Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.
I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.
That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.
Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.
So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.
We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.