It was a casual party.
Over salmon and wildflowers, Barbara Ehrenreich discusses future articles with the editors of Harper’s Magazine. Then, as she recalled, the conversation drifted.
How can you live on minimum wage? A persistent journalist must find it.
Her editor, Louis Lafam, half-smiled, responded with one word: “You.”
The result was Nickel and Dimed: About Life (Not) in America (2001), a book that subverts the insults, misery, and struggles of being a low-wage worker in America. It became a bestseller and a classic of social justice literature.
Journalist, activist and author Ehrenreich died Thursday at the age of 81 at a hospice facility in Alexandria, Virginia. His home was there too. Her daughter, Rosa Brooks, said the cause was a stroke.
Ehrenreich, who worked as a waitress near Key West, Florida, quickly discovered that she needed two jobs to make ends meet in her Nickel and Dimed report. As a hotel housekeeper, cleaning lady, nursing home assistant, and Walmart employee, even after repeated experiments in journalism elsewhere, I found it nearly impossible to live on an average wage of $7 an hour. rice field.
She concluded that all jobs require skill and intelligence and should be paid accordingly.
Nickel and Dimed, one of more than 20 books written by Ehrenreich, boosted wage growth just as the dot-com bubble hit the economy in 2001 .
“Many people have complimented me on my bravery in doing this — millions of people do this kind of work every day for the rest of their lives — haven’t you noticed them?” she said. said in acceptance in 2018 speech after receiving Erasmus Prizegiven to individuals or institutions that have made outstanding contributions to the humanities, social sciences or the arts.
Ehrenreich drew attention to these millions through her writings, which tackled topics as diverse as the myth of the American Dream, the labor market, healthcare, poverty, and women’s rights. Her motivation came from her desire to shine a light on the “overlooked and forgotten” people, not just the public, her editor Sarah Burshtel said in her email. rice field.
Barbara Alexander was born on August 26, 1941 in Butte, Montana, into a working-class family. Her mother, Isabel Oxley, was her homemaker. Her father, Benjamin Howes Alexander, was a copper miner who later earned a PhD. He earned a doctorate in metallurgy from Carnegie University of Pittsburgh and became director of research at Gillette.
Ehrenreich recalled growing up steeped in family lore about mining, so he thought it was normal for men over 40 to do dangerous work, at least with missing fingers.
“So for me, sitting at my desk all day was not only a privilege, it was also a duty. I owe it to those who have told me about it,” she writes in the preface to “Nickels and Dimmeds.”
Both of her parents were heavy drinkers. In her 2014 memoir, she described her mother’s anger as the “central force field” of her home during her childhood. She believed her mother’s death from her heart attack was caused by an intentional pill overdose.
Ehrenreich graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1963. She received her doctorate in cell biology from Rockefeller University in New York in 1968, where she met her first husband, John Ehrenreich.
After completing her studies, she became a budget analyst for New York City and in 1969 became a staff member of the (now defunct) New York-based nonprofit Health Policy Advisory Center. In 1971, she began working as an assistant professor of health sciences. State University of New York Old She Westbury program. However, the social and political upheavals of the 1960s aroused her anger and fueled her desire to write.
Her first book, Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad (1969), co-authored with Ehrenreich, grew out of her anti-Vietnam War activism. Her second book of them, The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics, was published the following year.
Ms. Ehrenreich left teaching in 1974 to become a full-time writer, selling many articles to Ms magazine in the 1970s.
“The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment” (1983), “Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class” (1989), “The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverence from the Decade of Greed” Notes” (1990) and “Blood Rituals: The Origin and History of the Passions of War” (1997).
But it was her first-hand account in Nickel and Dimed that resonated with working Americans and was a turning point in her career.
Following the book’s success, Mr. Ehrenreich applied immersive journalism techniques to produce works about dysfunctional aspects of the American social order. They include “Bait and Switch: The (Futility) Pursuit of the American Dream” (2005) and “Smile or Die” on the dangers of “positive thinking” in inadequate medical care. (2009) were included.
In her memoir, Living With a Wild God (2014), she focused on her troubled and unconventional experiences as a teenager.
She has also written articles and essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, and The New Republic, held a series of academic posts, taught women’s studies at Brandeis University, and wrote essays at the university’s Graduate School of Journalism. I have written. California, Berkeley.
Her 1966 marriage to Mr. Ehrenreich ended in divorce in 1982. Her daughter Ms. Brooks is a law professor and her son Ben Ehrenreich is a journalist. He has two brothers, Benjamin Alexander Jr. and Diane Alexander. and three grandchildren. She remarried Gary Stevenson in 1983, but divorced in 1993.
In recent years, Ehrenreich has come to believe that many people living at or near poverty levels do not need someone to speak up in their struggle.
Instead, she believed that with greater support, individuals could tell their own stories. We have created a financial hardship reporting project focused on providing financial assistance to house cleaners, professional journalists and others who find themselves in difficult times.
Her latest book, Had I Known: Collected Essays (2020), brings together 40 years of her articles on sexism, health, economics, science, religion, and other topics. Nearly all of them had repeatedly warned of rising poverty and worsening inequality.
Ehrenreich’s anger at inequality persisted in his later years. in a 2020 interview In The New Yorker, she said the lack of paid sick leave and declining working-class well-being still gave her “horrible and angry thoughts.”
“We turned out to be very vulnerable in the United States,” she said. “Not just because there are no or few safety nets, but because of the lack of emergency preparedness and social infrastructure.”
In 2018, she published ‘Natural Causes’. This tackled the topic of getting older and bluntly denounced the wellness movement.
“All deaths can now be understood as suicides,” she wrote. “We are adamant about subjecting someone who apparently died prematurely to a sort of biomoral autopsy. Did she smoke? Did she drink too much? In other words, can she blame herself for her death?”
Ehrenreich continued to write well into her 80s and began writing a book about the evolution of narcissism after her death, her daughter said.
Ehrenreich said he believes his job as a journalist is to shed light on the world’s needless pain.
“It’s not the idea of winning with our lives, it’s our measure,” she told The New Yorker, “but we’ll try and die.
Alex Traub contributed to the report.