Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander. She is an american feminist, political activist and a democratic socialist, also “a myth buster by trade” as she describes herself. She is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed, and a contributing writer to Time magazine. Following finishing her doctorate, Ehrenreich didn’t pursue a career in science. Rather, she worked first as an analyst, using the Bureau of the Budget in New York City and the Wellness Policy Advisory Center, and later as an assistant professor at the State University of New York. In 1972, Ehrenreich began co-teaching a course on women and health with feminist journalist and academic Deirdre English. Via the rest of the seventies, Ehrenreich worked mostly in health-related analysis, advocacy and activism, which includes co-writing, with English, several feminist books and pamphlets on tankless water heaters the history and politics of women’s well being. During this period, she began speaking regularly at conferences staged by women’s well being centers and women’s groups, universities, as well as the United States government. She also spoke often about socialist feminism and feminism in general.All through her career, Ehrenreich spent some time working as a freelance writer, and she is very best identified for her non-fiction reportage, book reviews and social commentary. Ehrenreich has one brother, Benjamin Jr., and one sister, Diane. When Ehrenreich was 35, based on the book Usually Too Soon: Voices of Support for People who Have Lost Both Parents, her mother died “from a likely suicide.” Her father passed away years later from Alzheimer’s disease. She has been married and also divorced twice. She met her first husband, John Ehrenreich, microdermabrasion machines during an anti-war activism campaign in New York City, and then they married in 1966. Ehrenreich is maybe best identified for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. A memoir of Ehrenreich’s 3 month experiment surviving on minimum wage as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart clerk, it was explained by Newsweek magazine as “jarring” and “full of riveting grit”, and by The New Yorker as an “exposé” putting “human flesh on the bones for these abstractions as “living wage” and “affordable housing.” Ehrenreich has served as founder, advisor or board member to a number of organizations including the U.S. National Women’s Wellness Network, the National Abortion Rights Action League, metal detector the National Mental Health Consumers’ Self-Help Clearinghouse, the Nationwide Women’s Program of the American Pals Service Committee, the Brooklyn-based Association for Union Democracy, political activist Robert Boehm’s Boehm Foundation, the anti-poverty group the Women’s Committee of 100, the National Writers Union, The Progressive magazine’s Progressive Media Project, the Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) advisory committee on females inside the media, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the Center for Popular Economics, as well as the Campaign for America’s Future. Between 1979 and 1981, she served as an adjunct steadicam associate professor at New York University and as a visiting professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia and at Sangamon State University. She lectured at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was a writer-in-residence at Ohio State University, Wayne Morse chair at the University of Oregon, a teaching fellow in the graduate school of journalism in the University of California at Berkeley. She has been a fellow in the New York Institute for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute for Policy Studies, as well as the New York-based Society of American Historians. In 2006, Ehrenreich founded United Specialists, hard money lenders an organization called “a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization for white-collar workers, regardless of profession or employment status. We reach out to all unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed workers – people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could result in a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their manage.” Ehrenreich is currently an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She also serves on the NORML Board of Directors, the Institute for Policy Studies Board of Trustees and the Nation’s Editorial Board. She has served on the editorial boards of Social Policy magazine, Ms., Mother Jones, Seven Days, Lear’s, The New Press, and Culturefront and as a contributing editor to Harper’s. Ehrenreich has two children. Rosa, born in 1970, was named after Rosa Parks and Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, as well as a great-grandmother. She is a Virginia-based columnist, expert on human rights and law of war problems, along with a foreign policy commentator. Benjamin was born in 1972 and is actually a journalist and novelist in Los Angeles. Filling in for a vacationing Thomas Friedman as a columnist using the New York Occasions in 2004, Ehrenreich wrote about how, in the fight for women’s reproductive rights, “it’s the ladies who shrink from acknowledging their very own abortions who actually irk me,” and said that she herself “had two abortions in the course of my all-too-fertile years.” In her 1990 book of essays The Worst Years of Our Lives, she wrote that “the 1 regret I have about my own abortions is that they price funds that might otherwise have been spent on some thing a lot more pleasurable, like taking the children to movies and theme parks.” Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the release of her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Obtaining By in America. This resulted within the award-winning article “Welcome to Cancerland,” published within the November 2001 concern of Harper’s Magazine. In 2000 Ehrenreich endorsed the Presidential campaign of Ralph Nader. In February 2008, Ehrenreich expressed support for Senator Barack Obama within the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.

Comments are closed.