Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘myth busting’ writer and activist, dies

Barbara Ehrenreich, the writer, activist and self-defined “delusion buster” who in such brilliant works as “Nickel and Dimed” and “Bait and Switch” challenged conventional thinking about class, faith and the very idea of an American dream, has died at age eighty one.

Ehrenreich died Thursday morning in Alexandria, Virginia, in keeping with her son, the writer and journalist Ben Ehrenreich. She had recently suffered a stroke.

“She changed into, she made clean, prepared to head,” Ben Ehrenreich tweeted Friday. “She became in no way a great deal for thoughts and prayers, however you can honor her reminiscence by loving one another, and via combating like hell.”

She become born Barbara Alexander in Butte, Montana, and raised in a household of union supporters, where family regulations covered “by no means pass a wooden line and never vote Republican.” She studied physics as an undergraduate at Reed College, and obtained a PhD in immunology at Rockefeller University. Starting in the 1970s, she labored as a instructor and researchers and became increasingly more energetic inside the feminist motion, from writing pamphlets to appearing at conferences around the u . S . A .. She additionally co-wrote a book on scholar activism, “Long March, Short Spring,” together with her then-husband, John Ehrenreich.A prolific author who frequently grew to become out books and newspaper and magazine articles, Ehrenreich honed an handy prose fashion that brought her a wide readership for in any other case unsettling and unsentimental ideas. She disdained individualism, prepared faith, unregulated economics and what Norman Vincent Peale famously known as “the electricity of fantastic questioning.”

A proponent of liberal reasons from unions to abortion rights, Ehrenreich often drew upon her own reports to communicate her thoughts. The start of her daughter Rosa helped inspired her to turn out to be a feminist, she later defined, due to the fact she changed into appalled on the sanatorium’s treatment of patients. Her conflict with breast most cancers years in the past inspired her 2009 e book “Bright-Sided,” in which she recalled the tasteless platitudes and assurances of nicely wishers and probed the American insistence — a faith, she known as it — on optimism, to the factor of ignoring the u . S .’s many problems.

“We need to brace ourselves for a conflict in opposition to terrifying barriers, each of our own making and imposed by the natural international. And the first step is to recover from the mass fantasy this is fantastic wondering,” she wrote.“Positive questioning has made itself beneficial as an apology for the crueler elements of the market economic system. If optimism is the important thing to material success, and if you could attain an optimistic outlook thru the field of effective questioning, then there may be no excuse for failure. The turn aspect of positivity is hence a harsh insistence on personal responsibility.”

For “Nickel and Dimed,” one among her first-rate known books, she labored in minimal wage jobs so she should analyze firsthand the struggles of the running bad, whom she known as “the important philanthropists of our society.”

“They neglect their personal kids in order that the kids of others can be cared for; they live in substandard housing in order that other homes will be vibrant and best; they bear privation in order that inflation might be low and stock charges high,” she wrote. “To be a member of the operating bad is to be an nameless donor, a anonymous benefactor, to absolutely everyone.”