Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich (/ˈɛərənraɪk/, AIR-ən-rike; née Alexander; 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 and the Erasmus Prize.

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". 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". 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". She had mystical experiences throughout her life, which she identified as belonging to a type of animism rather than theism.

"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 mother was a deeply unhappy homemaker. 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. A high-functioning alcoholic, he strongly valued intelligence.

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 studied physics at Reed College, switched to chemistry, graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis was Electrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode. In 1968, she enrolled in a theoretical physics Ph.D, 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."

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.