Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich 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. 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."