Ehrenreich wields essays as activism
Vein of dark wit runs through collection written over decades
Despite her unwavering radicalism, there are almost as many Barbara Ehrenreichs as there are Barbara Ehrenreich books.
There’s the muckraking undercover journalist (“Nickel and Dimed,” “Bait and Switch”); the participantobserver of the professionalmanagerial class (“Fear of Falling”); the autodidact pursuing her expansive curiosity by studying enormous subjects as varied as war and collective joy (“Blood Rites,” “Dancing in the Streets”). Ehrenreich has written about her experiences as a breast cancer patient (“Bright-Sided,” “Natural Causes”) and as a sullen teenager who was desperately searching for meaning (“Living With a Wild God”). In the early 1990s, she even published “Kipper’s Game,” a novel of environmental degradation and suburban malaise.
“Had I Known” is billed as a collection of essays from the past four decades, but the Ehrenreich in these pages will be most familiar to the million-plus readers of “Nickel and Dimed,” which began as an article for Harper’s Magazine that is reprinted here. The subjects of these pieces include sexism and health, science and religion, but almost all of them share her repeated warnings about growing poverty and worsening inequality, even when she was writing during the go-go decades of the ’80s and ’90s — what she calls “the fat years.”
Ehrenreich recalls how after “Nickel and Dimed” was published in 2001, she was initiated into the rarefied world of ample royalties and lavish speaking fees. At the same time, “the world of journalism as I had known it was beginning to crumble.” The number of established outlets was shrinking. News sites may have proliferated online, but they didn’t pay much, if at all. Corporatization and technological upheaval were hollowing out yet another middle-class profession.
As one of the haves, Ehrenreich could afford to write what she wanted, but she was bothered by a dispensation that allowed an affluent person like her to produce articles about homelessness and hunger while those who truly struggled couldn’t afford to write about what they understood firsthand. She created a nonprofit organization called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project to support the work of journalists “who otherwise might never be heard from on account of their poverty or skin color, gender or sexual orientation,” and dedicates this new book to them.
It’s a surprisingly earnest introduction for a writer who once offered a modest proposal titled “Liposuction: The Key to Energy Independence,” in which excised body fat would serve as a replacement for fossil fuels (all those dinosaur bones processed into “corpse juice,” in her memorable formulation). But this collection also shows how Ehrenreich’s sincere activist efforts have always contained a vein of dark wit. The reigning neoliberal order, she argues, is not only harmful but absurd; just as some pharmaceutical companies profit from pesticides that arguably contribute to the cancers they offer to treat, Silicon Valley stokes attention disorders while piously peddling mindfulness apps. In “Nickel and Dimed,” she recalls getting “interviewed” by a computer for a job that paid peanuts at the WinnDixie.
Sexism provides another rich target. The “new man” of the 1980s wasn’t so much a true ally of feminist struggle as he was a self-regarding soul whose vaunted “sensitivity” was most often expressed in a “fatuous volubility on the subject of fathering.” In a satirical essay from the same decade, written from the depths of the pornography wars, she describes organizing a “little group of citizens” plucked from the PTA and the local aerobics class to read one of the most obscene books they could find — the Bible. “We were soon rewarded with examples of sexism so crude and so nasty that they would make ‘The Story of O’ look like suffragist propaganda.”
There’s a consistent tone to all of the essays: tough and acerbic, crusty to the point of imperturbable. When she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, Ehrenreich wasn’t fazed by the corporate-sponsored pink-ribbon kitsch; she was simply repulsed by it. “Let me be hacked to death by a madman,” she deadpans, looking askance at the infantilizing objects that festooned the hospital where she was “squished” for her mammography; “anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that bear and oozing from the walls of the changing room.”
Ehrenreich credits her parents — lifelong Democrats and resolute atheists — for her radical politics and “allaround bad attitude.” They grew up working-class: Her father was a copper miner in Butte, Mont., before getting a degree and changing careers, eventually becoming a corporate executive. Ehrenreich was only 2 when the family left Montana, but to hear her tell it, it was almost as if she never left. From her parents, she absorbed a distrust of “phonies” and rich people, along with a staunch insistence on a steady diet of greasy food.
Her upbringing was painful — though you wouldn’t know it by reading the essays in this book. In “Living With a Wild God” — a roving and candid exploration of her intellectual coming-of-age — she described a philandering, alcoholic father and a miserable, hypercritical mother. None of that rippling complexity comes through in “Had I Known,” in which her parents inevitably appear as hardy blue-collar types: honorable, gruff, no-nonsense.
But then the Ehrenreich of this collection is Ehrenreich the activist, the author of startlingly prescient essays and scabrous op-eds. She was writing about the splintering middle class during the self-congratulatory Reagan years, and about problems of trickle-down feminism long before well-heeled women were exhorted to lean in. These pieces weren’t the place for her to parse any ambivalence. After all, she had a job to do.