Barbara Ehrenreich - Class Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s... the peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.

Barbara Ehrenreich
A great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class.... You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $65 billion family fortune?

Barbara Ehrenreich
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.

Barbara Ehrenreich
There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.

Barbara Ehrenreich
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
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
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
Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores.... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goats cheese... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.

Barbara Ehrenreich