black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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

Class Country Feminist Movement Vigorous
The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Feminism Feminist Males
The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Men People Sex
People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don’t expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don’t want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Exercise Judging People Perform Power President
Even when uttered by Democrats, “middle class” often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, “Us, and not them,” where “them” includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Class People Snakes
An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not – and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it’s microbes. They’re the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Asteroids May Successful
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

Careers Humorous Mother
Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Country Debt Medical Number
The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce. It creates a lot of anger and emotional hardship. People may become quite depressed.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Divorce Emotional Jobs
The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Abortion Kids Regret
The secret of the truly successful … is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Busy Secret Successful
What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the ‘negative people’ from one’s life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Mean Practice Teenager
Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

False Hope Medicine Pain
It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Men Narcissistic Results
For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Bracing Cappuccino Impossible Little
There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Fun Language Purpose Speaker

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes