Ehrenreich, Barbara (1941–)

Contemporary American social commentator and activist, Barbara Ehrenreich was born August 26, 1941. Ehrenreich attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in biology at the Rockefeller University in New York. Instead of continuing her scientific career, Ehrenreich chose to follow her passion for social change and activism by pursuing a different path as a writer and journalist. From 1991 to 1997, she worked as a regular columnist for Time magazine. In recent years, she has contributed a monthly column for The Progressive. Ehrenreich's work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, http://Salon.com, and other publications. As of 2007, she has published 19 books, including a novel, on a range of topics and issues, including the student protest movement of the 1960s, health care, feminism, war, and class. She currently serves as vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and has also taught courses at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1998, at the urging of Lewis Lapham, the longtime editor of Harper's magazine, Ehrenreich undertook an experiment that resulted in her most famous book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

In the wake of the Clinton administration's program of welfare reform, which forced millions of the American poor off of the welfare rolls and into the job market, Ehrenreich sought to discover whether a single mother with limited education and work experience could survive in the world of low-wage work. Over the next year and a half, she worked as a waitress and hotel housekeeper in West Palm Beach, Florida, for a maid service and nursing home in Portland, Maine, and as a sales associate at a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ehrenreich's experiences formed the basis for the book Nickel and Dimed, a scathing indictment of class in America that reveals the daily struggles of low-wage earners to make ends meet. Published to critical acclaim, the book incited much controversy when it was adopted for the freshman summer reading program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Condemned as the Antichrist of North Carolina, Ehrenreich found herself at the center of a storm that reached to the halls of the North Carolina state legislature and that helped propel the plight of unskilled workers to national attention.

In her most recent book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream of 2005, Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the experiences of middle-class, white-collar workers, victims of globalization displaced by the downsizing of American corporations, and their struggles to obtain new jobs in a rapidly changing economy. Her latest project, a book tentatively titled Obscene and Savage Rituals: The War Against Festivity, will address the decline of festivity in modern culture. Through her books and essays, Barbara Ehrenreich remains one of our most trenchant social critics, one whose work is always firmly rooted in the lived experiences of those whose voices are mostly silenced by the contemporary regime of capital and globalization.

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