It was an informal assembly.
Over salmon and area greens, Barbara Ehrenreich was discussing future articles together with her editor at Harper’s Journal. Then, as she recalled, the dialog drifted.
How, she requested, might anybody survive on minimal wage? A tenacious journalist ought to discover out.
Her editor, Lewis Lapham, provided a half smile and a single phrase reply: “You.”
The end result was the guide “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” (2001), an undercover account of the indignities, miseries and toil of being a low-wage employee in america. It grew to become a finest vendor and a traditional in social justice literature.
Ms. Ehrenreich, the journalist, activist and writer, died at 81 on Thursday at a hospice facility in Alexandria, Va., the place she additionally had a house. Her daughter, Rosa Brooks, stated the trigger was a stroke.
Working as a waitress close to Key West, Fla., in her reporting for “Nickel and Dimed,” Ms. Ehrenreich shortly discovered that it took two jobs to make ends meet. After repeating her journalistic experiment elsewhere as a lodge housekeeper, cleansing woman, nursing dwelling aide and Wal-Mart affiliate, she nonetheless discovered it practically unimaginable to subsist on a mean of $7 an hour.
Each job takes ability and intelligence, she concluded, and ought to be paid accordingly.
One in all greater than 20 books written by Ms. Ehrenreich, “Nickel and Dimed” bolstered the motion for increased wages simply as the implications of the dot-com bubble snaked via the financial system in 2001.
“Many individuals praised me for my bravery for having performed this — to which I might solely say: Hundreds of thousands of individuals do this type of work day-after-day for his or her whole lives — haven’t you seen them?” she stated in 2018 in an acceptance speech after receiving the Erasmus Prize, given to an individual or establishment that has made an distinctive contribution to the humanities, the social sciences or the humanities.
Ms. Ehrenreich seen these thousands and thousands all through a writing profession during which she tackled a wide range of themes: the parable of the American dream, the labor market, well being care, poverty and ladies’s rights. Her motivation got here from a need to make clear odd folks in addition to the “missed and the forgotten,” her editor, Sara Bershtel, stated in an electronic mail.
Barbara Alexander was born on Aug. 26, 1941, in Butte, Mont., right into a working-class household. Her mom, Isabelle Oxley, was a homemaker; her father, Benjamin Howes Alexander, was a copper miner who later earned a Ph.D. in metallurgy at Carnegie Mellon College in Pittsburgh and have become director of analysis at Gillette.
Having grown up steeped in household lore concerning the mines, Ms. Ehrenreich recalled considering it was regular for a person over 40 to do harmful work and be lacking at the least a finger.
“So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not solely a privilege however an obligation: one thing I owed to all these folks in my life, residing and useless, who’d had a lot extra to say than anybody ever acquired to listen to,” she wrote within the introduction to “Nickel and Dimed.”
Each of her dad and mom had been heavy drinkers. In a 2014 memoir, she described her mom’s wrath because the “central drive area” of her childhood dwelling. She believed that her mom’s demise, from a coronary heart assault, had been induced by an intentional overdose of capsules.
Ms. Ehrenreich graduated from Reed School in Portland, Ore., in 1963. She acquired a Ph.D. in cell biology in 1968 from Rockefeller College in New York, the place she met her first husband, John Ehrenreich.
After her research, she grew to become a price range analyst for New York Metropolis after which a employees member on the New York-based (and now defunct) nonprofit Well being Coverage Advisory Heart in 1969. In 1971 she started working as an assistant professor within the Well being Sciences Program on the State College of New York, Previous Westbury. However the social and political upheaval of the Sixties woke up her anger and fueled her need to jot down.
Her first guide, “Lengthy March, Quick Spring: The Scholar Rebellion at Residence and Overseas” (1969), co-written with Mr. Ehrenreich, grew out of her anti-Vietnam Struggle activism. Their second guide, “The American Well being Empire: Energy, Income and Politics,” was revealed the subsequent yr.
Ms. Ehrenreich give up her educating job in 1974 to grow to be a full-time author, promoting a variety of articles to Ms. journal within the Seventies.
Quite a few critically acclaimed books adopted, together with “The Hearts of Males: American Desires and the Flight from Dedication” (1983), “Concern of Falling: The Inside Lifetime of the Center Class” (1989), “The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed” (1990) and “Blood Rites: Origins and Historical past of the Passions of Struggle” (1997).
It was her firsthand reporting in “Nickel and Dimed,” nonetheless, that resonated with working Individuals and have become a turning level in her profession.
Following the guide’s success, Ms. Ehrenreich utilized her immersive journalism approach to works concerning the dysfunctional aspect of the American social order. These included “Bait and Swap: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream” (2005) and “Smile or Die” (2009), concerning the risks of “constructive considering” amid insufficient well being care.
In her memoir, “Residing With a Wild God” (2014), she centered on her troubling, unconventional experiences as a teen.
She additionally wrote articles and essays for The New York Instances, The Washington Put up Journal, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation and The New Republic and held educational posts, educating girls’s research at Brandeis and essay writing on the Graduate Faculty of Journalism on the College of California, Berkeley.
Her marriage to Mr. Ehrenreich in 1966 led to divorce in 1982. Along with their daughter, Ms. Brooks, a regulation professor, she is survived by their son, Ben Ehrenreich, a journalist; two siblings, Benjamin Alexander Jr. and Diane Alexander; and three grandchildren. Her second marriage, to Gary Stevenson in 1983, led to divorce in 1993.
Lately Ms. Ehrenreich got here to imagine that many individuals residing at or close to the poverty stage didn’t want another person to present voice to their struggles.
As an alternative, she thought that people might inform their very own tales if they’d better help. She created the Financial Hardship Reporting Challenge, which centered on serving to the work of underrepresented folks get revealed and offering financial help to manufacturing facility employees, home cleaners, skilled journalists and others who had fallen on exhausting instances.
Her most up-to-date guide, “Had I Recognized: Collected Essays” (2020), compiles 4 many years of her articles on sexism, well being, the financial system, science, faith and different subjects. Nearly all of them shared repeated warnings about rising poverty and worsening inequality.
Ms. Ehrenreich’s anger at inequity remained unabated late in her life. In a 2020 interview with The New Yorker, she stated an absence of paid sick-leave and the declining well-being of the working class nonetheless gave her “grim and rageful ideas.”
“We grow to be so weak in america,” she stated. “Not solely as a result of we have now no security internet, or little or no of 1, however as a result of we have now no emergency preparedness, no social infrastructure.”
In 2018, she revealed “Pure Causes,” which addressed the subject of rising outdated and bluntly excoriated the wellness motion.
“Each demise can now be understood as suicide,” she wrote. “We persist in subjecting anybody who dies at a seemingly premature age to a form of bio-moral post-mortem: Did she smoke? Drink excessively? Eat an excessive amount of fats and never sufficient fiber? Can she, in different phrases, be blamed for her personal demise?”
Ms. Ehrenreich continued writing into her 80s and at her demise had begun work on a guide concerning the evolution of narcissism, her daughter stated.
Ms. Ehrenreich stated she believed that her job as a journalist was to make clear the pointless ache on this planet.
“The concept isn’t that we’ll win in our personal lifetimes and that’s the measure of us,” she informed The New Yorker, “however that we’ll die attempting.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
