[Remembrances of the late author have focused on her best-selling
Nickel and Dimed with only rare acknowledgement of the major roles she
played in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism.]
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MY REVOLUTIONARY INSPIRATION, BARBARA EHRENREICH  
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Lynne Segal
September 15, 2022
Boston Review
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_ Remembrances of the late author have focused on her best-selling
Nickel and Dimed with only rare acknowledgement of the major roles she
played in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism. _

Barbara Ehrenreich in London, 2006. , Steve Pyke/Getty

 

None of the obituaries I have read of feminist fighter, activist, and
writer Barbara Ehrenreich come close to capturing her significance to
the movement, apart from the one penned by her lifelong friend Deirdre
English for _Mother Jones_
[[link removed]].
Nearly all others give center stage to her powerful best-seller
_Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America_ (2001), a stirring
undercover account of the appalling poverty, stress, and disrespect
faced by the working poor, especially women. Written at the beginning
of twenty-first century, it remains a shocking description of the
obscene inequality characterizing our times. It is a book that any
person of progressive leanings will applaud.

However, by the time _Nickel and Dimed _was published, Ehrenreich had
already had a long career stretching back to the heyday of women’s
liberation, when she’d left her indelible mark on the movement by
battling to preserve within it the revolutionary socialist current
initially at the heart of Western feminism. First and foremost she
was, and remained, the archetypal socialist feminist. Like Sheila
Rowbotham in the UK, Barbara helped shape its meaning, as part of an
“internationalist anti-racist, anti-heterosexist feminism.” In her
germinal essay “What is Socialist Feminism?” (1976), she explains
that socialist feminists are distinct from classical Marxists in that
they aim “to transform not only the ownership of the means of
production, but the totality of social existence . . . women who
seemed most peripheral [to Marxists], the housewives, are at the very
heart of their class—raising children, holding together families,
maintaining the cultural and social networks of the community.” She
maintained this distinctive stance in all she said and did until her
dying breath, having just turned eighty-one.

The very first time I met her, in the late 1970s, she was visiting me
in North London at the Islington Community Press, where I helped
produce an alternative local paper, committed to supporting the
colorful diversity of radical grassroots struggles. “We must form an
international conspiracy of feminist guerrillas,” Barbara laughed.
Captivated by her witty, thrilling company, I soon visited my exciting
new acquaintance in her home in Syosset, Long Island, meeting her
charming children Rosa and Benjy, and her militant Teamster second
husband Gary Stevenson. Later I would also stay in her lush home in
Sugarloaf Key, Florida. I also had the huge pleasure of welcoming
Barbara to my own home on several visits she made to London to promote
the launch of her many books over the years. “How come you’ve
kidnapped the sexiest men in London and got them holed up here
servicing you?” she quipped, with characteristic exaggeration,
surveying my collective household in the 1980s. Men sharing domestic
responsibilities with women really met with her approval, since she
feared that feminism might assist men in avoiding housework and caring
responsibilities—that men would suddenly feel freer to abandon newly
“independent” women.

This was a topic she tackled in one of her earlier books, _The Hearts
of Men: __American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment_ (1983).
There she argued that even before women’s liberation, some men were
cheerfully resisting domestic ties and duties, envious of the life
they saw in _Playboy_, in whose pages women were still submissive,
nurturing, and responsive, yet also financially independent. By the
1980s, with the arrival of recession and welfare cutbacks in much of
the West, Barbara feared that feminism might have “freed men
first,” leaving more women only a divorce away from chronic poverty,
left trying to support themselves and their children without men’s
higher wage. Always a personal inspiration, I often seemed to be
following in Barbara’s footsteps: by the end of the decade, I was
writing my own book about men after feminism, _Slow Motion: Changing
Masculinities, Changing Men_ (1990), although in it I didn’t fully
share Barbara’s robust cynicism of men, since in the left
libertarian households I knew household chore rotations and shared
childcare were sacrosanct.

Within her career, _The Hearts of Men _was an outlier, however:
Barbara’s heart always remained largely focused on women, especially
the most oppressed and exploited. The point of her socialist feminism
was not to waste her time berating men; she was happier poking fun at
what she saw as the residual pathetic “rubble of patriarchy.” In
one of her late articles for _The Baffler_, “Patriarchy Deflated”
(2018), she encouraged any woman to “laugh out loud at every
instance of male and class-based pomposity,” while pondering “what
a world shaped by the _female_ pursuit of pleasure might look like.”

Barbara was all too aware of the cruelties and exploitation women have
always faced, simply from being born female. Indeed, her first
international best-seller, _Witches, Midwives and Nurses_ (1972),
written exactly half a century ago with Deirdre English (former
editor-in-chief of _Mother Jones_), reminded readers of the grotesque
history of witchcraft persecution. The book argues that accusations of
evildoing directed at women healers and midwives helped the emerging
medical profession to exclude women from the expanding (male) power of
the medical profession.

Later studies complicated that story, suggesting that the majority of
people persecuted during the long period of Western witch-hunts were
predominantly not women healers, but simply destitute women,
especially older women living on their own. However, that book was
important in highlighting women’s prolonged exclusion from the
medical profession until well into the twentieth century. Two
subsequent books by Ehrenreich and English on the effects of such
exclusion, _Complaints and Disorders _(1973) and _For Her Own Good_
(1978), cover the routine sexism evident in the treatment of women as
the weaker, pathological sex. They also highlight the deeply
contrasting class and race differences in the levels of care and
respect patients receive from doctors and psychiatrists. Her interest
in the wholly inadequate nature of health care in the United States
had actually begun well before, when living with her first husband and
enduring friend, John Ehrenreich. Together they wrote _The American
Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics_ (1971), after having
participated in and researched the global dimensions of student revolt
in the late sixties for _Long March, Short Spring_ (1969).

Yet, always a militant feminist, Barbara also knew that whatever the
enduring evils inflicted on women because of their sex, “there is no
way to understand sexism as it acts on our lives without putting it in
the historical context of capitalism.” It was exploring that
shifting historical context that became her life work, even as she
mourned the decline of socialist feminist organizing in the United
States. In her essay “Life without Father: Reconsidering
Socialist-Feminist Theory” for _Socialist Review_ (1984), Barbara
described how, back in the seventies, socialist feminist conferences
had been irreparably damaged by the activities of a few
Marxist-Leninist and Maoist groups. It was the very success of the
autonomous socialist feminist movement by the mid-1970s that attracted
the aggressive incursions of a few women determined to impose on other
feminists the forms of hierarchical discipline and outlook drawn from
their own fringe left grouplets. As Barbara later mourned, these
“sects” joined and harassed more than twenty socialist feminist
groups around the United States, “dragging almost all of them down
to their deaths in arcane squabbles over the ‘correct line’”:
“I have never seen an adequate—or even inadequate—account of
this nasty phase of left feminist history that addresses . . . why
socialist-feminist organizations, including the successful and
level-headed Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, crumbled in the face
of so much bullshit.” In sync again, I would later report similar
sectarian battles undermining socialist feminist conferences in the UK
at much the same time in my reflections on the decline of socialist
feminism in the UK, _Is the Future Female: Troubled Thoughts on
Contemporary Feminism _(1987). Other British feminists were also
troubled by the shifting feminist terrain when the ties between
feminism and the left were fragmenting, along with the weakening of
the left itself.

Undeterred, with socialist feminism soon overtaken by a more
aspirational, distinctly women-centered feminism in the United States,
Barbara joined and soon cochaired the independent activist alliance
the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the 1980s, alongside the
late Michael Harrington. Her daily work turned then to recording and
protesting the “decade of greed” ushered in by Ronald Reagan, a
year after Margaret Thatcher moved the right into power in the UK.
That decade of increasing inequality and poverty was generating
anxieties even among the professional middle class. In _Fear of
Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class_ (1989), Barbara revealed
them now struggling to preserve their privileges and provide every
possible advantage for their children to ensure their upwardly
mobility in the face of rising hardship among the working class.

With Clinton’s election in 1992, Barbara was busy organizing against
his destructive “reforms”, cutting welfare and food stamps,
thereby forcing women, especially those supporting dependents on their
own, to work in jobs that denied them even a living wage. This is what
led to her research for _Nickel and Dimed_, with its vivid
descriptions of the plight of women forced to work not one but two or
more jobs, struggling at home and at work simply to keep themselves
and their families from total destitution. She succinctly summarized
this suffering in a 2009 blog:

The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the
working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing
American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The
current recession is knocking the working poor down another
notch—from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic
employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long
imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third
world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.

In _Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
_(2005), written as a companion to _Nickel and Dimed_, but also as a
kind of sequel to_ Fear of Falling_, Barbara this time entered the
anxious world of job-seeking middle-class women to observe them
struggling to find work within the corrupt networking cultures of the
corporate world. Chronic failure to secure employment left them with a
massive sense self-blame, even as it pushed them onto the expanding
slide of downward mobility.

However, there was always a global dimension to Barbara’s socialist
feminism, and she was quick to underscore the worldwide reach of the
harsh entrenchment of class, ethnicity, and gender in her homeland.
The low-wage workers struggling in an inhospitable world were
increasingly drawn from international care chains of the most
hyper-exploited women. It was the other side of the imperial plunder
that had helped impoverish the birth places they felt forced to leave.
After teaming up with eminent sociologist Arlie Hochschild, Barbara
cowrote _Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New
Economy _(2003) to address the distinct disadvantages, insecurities,
and indignities faced by immigrant domestic and sex workers in the
United States. These women were shouldering the U.S. “care
deficit” so that they could send remittances to their own families
and children whom they’d left far behind.

Yet, amidst so much gloom, Barbara never lost faith in the power of
radical direct action, nor in people’s potential for collective
celebration. She was the severest critic of the United States’
pernicious promotion of individual optimism, cheeriness, and the power
of “positive” thinking. In another passionate publications,
_Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking __Is Undermining America _(2009),
published in the UK with the more concrete command _Smile or Die_, she
excoriates the new “science of happiness” as an ideological move
to discourage people’s acknowledgment of loss, sorrow, or anger,
since in neoliberal times, even the emotional life must be made to
serve market interests. The relentless pressure to present a cheerful
face, she argues, encourages a morbid preoccupation with feelings of
guilt for failing to flourish against impossible odds, while
deliberately undermining people’s courage to resist abuse and
exploitation, or even their capacity for critical reflection. This
same ideology also lay behind the most rapacious and destructive
aspects of U.S. capitalism at the national level. Its blind
insouciance to anything impeding profits, she argues, facilitated the
reckless financial gambling responsible for the economic collapse of
2007–8. Its repudiation of suffering also fostered engagement and
compliance with U.S. military aggression which, while first and
foremost catastrophic for the countries invaded, was always
devastating for anyone caught up in the mutilations of warfare.

So where is joy? Unfailingly outraged by the prevalence of suffering
everywhere, Barbara was nevertheless always on the lookout for sources
of pleasure and hope, sometimes finding them in the grimmest of
situations. Her call for collective joy was one that came from a
deeply held belief that such celebrations were essential for the
health of any society. Never frightened of encompassing the broadest
geographical and historical sweep, in her book _Dancing in the
Streets_ (2007) Barbara traced the repeated clashes between rapturous
merrymakers and righteous moralizers right back to Pentheus, the king
of the Thebes, in Greek mythology. And, following Max Weber, she saw
the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as
responsible for the gradual suppression of free, exultant public
festivals, with church and state colluding to prevent them once
industrialization required workers to remain sober and disciplined
year-round. While Weber wrote of the widespread disenchantment
accompanying the spread of the Protestant ethic, Barbara attributed
the prevalence of widespread depression in our own times to the
gradual disappearance of carnival life and the dampening down of
community celebrations. As ever, I cautiously borrowed aspects of
Barbara’s thinking for my own book _Radical Happiness: Moments of
Collective Joy _(2017)_. _For both of us, the fundamental point was to
promote collective engagement with the world, escaping the sad
self-monitoring that we are urged into at every turn.

Entertaining as Barbara’s writing always was, her most lasting
legacy is her tireless involvement in the political domain. She never
sought and tended to dislike the celebrity bestowed upon her after
_Nickel and Dimed_. As a socialist and a feminist, she was horrified
with injustice in the world at large, which once took her on a trip to
Palestine, where she would be interrogated at length on her departure
from Israel, the border authorities even confiscating her vacation
reading, a harmless thriller. And she was outraged at the wretched
poverty expanding unremittingly in the richest country in the world.
Barbara’s sharp anger and denunciation of the chronic exploitation
and abuse which the affluent ignore, or assist, was invariably
delivered with acerbic wit and gritty humor. It’s why she was always
exciting to encounter or observe. Both her outlook and performance
provided a model of how to remain an engaged socialist feminist, while
supporting all forms of progressive resistance. Not long ago, when
interviewed by a young journalist, Gabriella Paiella, for _GQ_ (March
2020), she explained that the best way for her to express anger was
through humor: “Humor contains a lot of aggression. That’s one
good way to let the anger and aggression out, and it’s always been a
source of inspiration to me.” The crucial point for Barbara—which
I try, no matter how inadequately, to follow and spread—was that we
_can_ find joy in collective resistance. In that conversation with
Paiella, Barbara suggests that, if asked to give one piece of advice
to young leftists, it would it be this: “Don’t forget to have a
good time. . . . Political work . . . should also be pleasurable,
sociable, fun. And if we can’t create organizations and enterprises
and cultures like that, we’re not going to succeed. . . . We have to
provide more attractive places to be, socially and collegially.”

She knew in the short term that we are likely to have only small
victories, especially with the rise of the right, with the reality
that Trump, the Tea Party, and MAGA still steer the Republican Party.
But, as she modeled for us, she would die fighting. And she did. Her
last great cause was the Economic Hardship Project which she founded
in 2012, funded by money she earned from _Nickel __and__ Dimed_. Its
goal was to encourage other journalists to write about class
deprivation and to embolden the voice of poor people themselves,
especially women struggling to support themselves and their
dependents.

It was such a privilege to have known Barbara. Her children, Ben
Ehrenreich and Rosa Brooks, continue her legacy, both writing on
injustice and destitution, near and far, leaving their mother
immeasurably proud of them both. Ben tells us today that Barbara’s
dying wish would be for us to “fight like hell” for a better
world. But whenever we can manage to continue fighting, in preserving
Barbara’s spirit we must also try to ensure we enjoy it as much as
we can. I see it in some recent left feminist movements, today more
often outside of the West. A new wave of feminist internationalism is
now evident in the huge marches to defend women’s rights to abortion
in Poland, and in the recent Green Wave of feminist militancy
(symbolized by women waving or wearing large green handkerchiefs) that
has swept across Latin America, with huge mobilizations to end
violence against women and secure women’s reproductive rights.
Turning history on its head, these activists sometimes say they hope
to inspire women in the United States to defend their own reproductive
rights. It could, I believe, lead Barbara to rest happily, knowing
that resistance continues, and that her voice can inspire us still.
You never know, socialist feminism may rise again in our own
heartlands, at least for those who come after us. Barbara Ehrenreich
must not be forgotten.

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Lynne Segal is Emerita Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender
Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College,
University of London. Her most recent book is the coauthored _The Care
Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence_
[[link removed]]. She is also
author of _Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy_
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Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism_
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_Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure_
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Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright) _Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and
the Making of Socialism_
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* Barbara Ehrenreich
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