Ehrenreich, Barbara

Journalist, writer, and social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich was born in 1941 in Butte, Montana, the daughter of Isabelle (Oxley) and Ben Howes Alexander. Her father worked in the copper mines and her mother, a homemaker, was active in the Democratic Party. A graduate of Reed College (B.A. 1963, chemistry and physics) and Rockefeller University (Ph.D. 1968, cell biology), Ehrenreich became involved in the anti-war movement and a member of other progressive causes including low-income housing and health care reform. In 1966 she married John Ehrenreich, a fellow activist with whom she co-authored Long March, Short Spring: the Student Uprising at Home and Abroad (1969), and The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (1970). The had two children, Rosa and Benjamin, and were later divorced.

While teaching at the State University of New York at Old Westbury (1971-1974), Ehrenreich began to write on the male domination of women's health care, publishing, with Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: One Hundred Fifty Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (1978). Subsequent books dealt with the antifeminist backlash of the 1980s (The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment), the legacy of the sexual revolution (Re-Making Love: the Feminization of Sex) and poverty (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America), among many others.

A socialist, Ehrenreich was a member of the Nassau County chapter of the New American Movement (NAM); in 1983 NAM merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to form the Democratic Socialists of America, which she cochaired and in which she was an active participant. In 1983 she married Gary Stevenson, a union organizer. Ehrenreich has been a distinguished visiting professor at a number of universities, and has been an essayist, columnist, and contributing editor to magazines, including Time, The Progressive, Ms., Mother Jones, and The Guardian. The recipient of the 1981 Ford Foundation Award for Humanistic Perspectives on Contemporary Society and a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship, she was awarded a grant for research and writing from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1994. She was active in a host of organizations, including the National Women's Health Network, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the Progressive Media Project, and the National Organization for Women's Commission for Responsive Democracy.