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In our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm — a bland and neutral mainstream — from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well. The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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I don't know when the cult of conspicuous busyness began, but it has swept up almost all the upwardly mobile, professional women I know. Already, it is getting hard to recall the days when, for example, 'Let's have lunch' meant something other than 'I've got more important things to do than talk to you right now'.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical 'name it and claim it' variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one's immediate, self-identified needs.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Poverty is not... a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The war with Iraq... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying.... we shopped till we dropped, all right, face down on the floor.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The business of the immune system is to defend the body against foreign intruders, such as microbes, and it does so with a huge onslaught of cells and whole cascades of different molecular weapons. The complexity, and diversity, of the mobilization is overwhelming.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your 'job.' Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The fundamental point that democratic socialists have always made remains as true today and as relevant as ever: That human needs must come first, that people are more important than profits, and that some things — health, housing, food, education — which are essential to human survival and dignity must be guaranteed as human rights.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Under the new system (aka capitalism, in this part of the world), huge numbers of people had to be convinced to work extra hard, at pitifully low wages, so that the employing class would not have to work at all. Overnight, with the help of a great number of preachers and other well-rested propagandists, work was upgraded from an indignity to an 'ethic'.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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It's even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stop mowing the lawn right now, it will probably be a long, long time before the yard gets overrun by lions and snakes.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to come from other Americans.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed.... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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All the basic technologies ever invented by human to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nose empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-colour catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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No job, no matter how lowly, is truly 'unskilled.'
Barbara Ehrenreich
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The 'discovery' of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the 'discovery' of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Barbara Ehrenreich
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Born:
August 26, 1941
Died:
September 1, 2022
(aged 81)
Bio:
Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist who described herself as "a myth buster by trade", and was called "a veteran muckraker" by The New Yorker.
Known for:
Nickel and Dimed (2001)
Bait and Switch (2006)
Dancing in the Streets (2006)
Most used words:
war
class
people
work
poverty
america
man
self
marriage
human
life
time
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