San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Journalist challenged myth of American dream
It was a casual meeting. Over salmon and field greens, Barbara Ehrenreich was discussing future articles with her editor at Harper’s Magazine. Then, as she recalled, the conversation drifted.
How could anyone survive on minimum wage? she mused. A tenacious journalist should find out.
Her editor, Lewis Lapham, offered a half-smile and a singleword reply: “You.”
The result was the book “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” (2001), an undercover account of the indignities, miseries and toil of being a low-wage worker in the United States. It became a bestseller and a classic in social justice literature.
Ehrenreich, the journalist, activist, author and former UC Berkeley instructor, died at 81 Thursday at a hospice facility in Alexandria, Va., where she also had a home. Her daughter, Rosa Brooks, said the cause was a stroke.
Working as a server near Key West, Fla., in her reporting for “Nickel and Dimed,” Ehrenreich quickly found that it took two jobs to make ends meet. After repeating her journalistic experiment in other places as a hotel housekeeper, cleaning lady, nursing home aide and WalMart associate, she still found it nearly impossible to subsist on an average of $7 an hour.
Every job takes skill and intelligence, she concluded, and should be paid accordingly.
One of more than 20 books written by Ehrenreich, “Nickel and Dimed” bolstered the movement for higher wages just as the consequences of the dot-com bubble snaked through the economy in 2001.
“Many people praised me for my bravery for having done this, to which I could only say: Millions of people do this kind of work every day for their entire lives — haven’t you noticed them?” she said in 2018 in an acceptance speech after receiving the Erasmus Prize, given to a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to the humanities, the social
sciences or the arts.
Ehrenreich noticed those millions throughout a writing career in which she tackled a variety of themes: the myth of the American dream, the labor market, health care, poverty and women’s rights. Her motivation came from a desire to shed light on ordinary people as well as the “overlooked and the forgotten,” her editor, Sara Bershtel, said in an email.
Barbara Alexander was born on Aug. 26, 1941, in Butte, Mont., into a working-class family. Her mother, Isabelle Oxley, was a homemaker; her father, Benjamin Howes Alexander, was a copper miner who later earned a doctorate in metallurgy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and became director of research at Gillette.
Having grown up steeped in family lore about the mines, Ehrenreich recalled thinking it was normal for a man over 40 to do dangerous work and be missing at least a finger.
“So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear,” she wrote in the introduction to “Nickel and Dimed.”
Both of her parents were heavy drinkers. In a 2014 memoir, she described her mother’s wrath as the “central force field” of her childhood home. She believed that her mother’s death, from a heart attack, had been induced by an intentional overdose of pills.
Ehrenreich graduated from Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1963. She received a doctorate in cell biology in 1968 from Rockefeller University in New York, where she met her first husband, John Ehrenreich.
After her studies, she became a budget analyst for New York City and then a staff member at the nonprofit Health Policy Advisory Center in New York in 1969. In 1971, she began working as an assistant professor in the Health Sciences Program at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. But the social and political upheaval of the 1960s awakened her anger and fueled her desire to write.
Her first book, “Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad” (1969), co-written with John Ehrenreich, grew out of her anti-Vietnam War activism. Their second book, “The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics,” was published the next year.
Ehrenreich quit her teaching job in 1974 to become a full-time writer, selling a number of articles to Ms. magazine in the 1970s.
Numerous critically acclaimed books followed, including “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: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed” (1990) and “Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War” (1997).
It was her firsthand reporting in “Nickel and Dimed,” however, that resonated with working Americans and became a turning point in her career.
Following the book’s success, Ehrenreich applied her immersive journalism technique to works about the dysfunctional side of the American social order. Those included “Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream” (2005) and “Smile or Die” (2009), about the dangers of “positive thinking” amid inadequate health care.
In her memoir, “Living With a Wild God” (2014), she focused on her troubling, unconventional experiences as a teenager.
She also wrote articles and essays for the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the Nation and the New Republic and held academic posts, teaching women’s studies at Brandeis and essay writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
Her marriage to John Ehrenreich in 1966 ended in divorce in 1982. In addition to their daughter, a law professor, she is survived by their son, Ben Ehrenreich, a journalist; two siblings,
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the American dream, the labor market, health care, poverty and women’s rights.
Benjamin Alexander Jr. and Diane Alexander; and three grandchildren. Her second marriage, to Gary Stevenson in 1983, ended in divorce in 1993.
Her most recent book, “Had I Known: Collected Essays” (2020), compiles four decades of her articles on sexism, health, the economy, science, religion and other topics. Almost all of them shared repeated warnings about growing poverty and worsening inequality.
Ehrenreich’s anger at inequity remained unabated late in her
life. In a 2020 interview with the New Yorker, she said a lack of paid sick leave and the declining well-being of the working class still gave her “grim and rageful thoughts.”
“We turn out to be so vulnerable in the United States,” she said, “not only because we have no safety net, or very little of one, but because we have no emergency preparedness, no social infrastructure.”