List of Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

There's More Pressure On Women To Be Chirpy And Perky.

Given The Cultural Barriers To Intersex Conversation, The Amazing Thing Is That We Would Even Expect Women And Men To Have Anything To Say To Each Other For More Than Ten Minutes At A Stretch. The Barriers Are Ancient -- Perhaps Rooted, As Some Paleontologist May Soon Discover, In The Contrast Between The Occasional Guttural Utterances Exchanged In Male Hunting Bands And The Extended Discussions Characteristic Of Female Food-gathering Groups.

When I Was Born, My Father Was A Copper Miner In Butte, Montana. It Was A Hard-core, Blue-collar Situation.

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.

America Is Addicted To Wars Of Distraction.

We Who Officially Value Freedom Of Speech Above Life Itself Seem To Have Nothing To Talk About But The Weather.

The Label Of Liberalism Is Hardly A Sentence To Public Ignominy: Otherwise Bruce Springsteen Would Still Be Rehabilitating Used Cadillacs In Asbury Park And Jane Fonda, For All We Know, Would Be Just Another Overweight Housewife.

Considering The Absence Of Legal Coercion, The Surprising Thing Is That Men Have For So Long, And, On The Whole, So Reliably, Adhered To What We Might Call The Breadwinner Ethic.

Upscale Young Men Seem To Go For The Kind Of Woman Who Plays With A Full Deck Of Credit Cards, Who Won't Cry When She's Knocked To The Ground While Trying To Board The Six O Clock Eastern Shuttle, And Whose Schedule Doesn't Allow For A Sexual Encounter Lasting More Than Twelve Minutes.

Surely There Must Be Some Way To Find A Husband Or, For That Matter, Merely An Escort, Without Sacrificing One's Privacy, Self-respect, And Interior Decorating Scheme. For Example, Men Could Be Imported From The Developing Countries, Many Parts Of Which Are Suffering From A Man Excess, At Least In Relation To Local Food Supply.

Thus Will The Fondest Dream Of Phallic Science Be Realized: A Pristine New Planet Populated Entirely By Little Boy Clones Of Great Scientific Entrepreneurs Free To Smash Atoms, Accelerate Particles, Or, If They Are So Moved, Build Pyramids -- Without Any Social Relevance Or Human Responsibility At All.

For A Long Time On Earth Humans Didn't Worship Good Gods; That's A New Idea. The Ancient Greek Gods, The Hindu Gods, Are Fairly Amoral, Most Of Them. We Get Stuck When We Insist That God Be Both Good And All-powerful.