My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.
BARBARA EHRENREICHMy Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.
BARBARA EHRENREICHOf all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation… none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
BARBARA EHRENREICHA cynic might conclude that the real purpose of the $500 million-a-year implant business is the implantation of fat in the bellies and rumps of underemployed plastic surgeons.
BARBARA EHRENREICHWhat 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 EHRENREICHBoth chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.
BARBARA EHRENREICHif you search the bible, you will find no reference to birth control or gay marriage, and you will not find a word, strangely, about stem cell research. I have searched.
BARBARA EHRENREICHThe less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.
BARBARA EHRENREICHWe who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
BARBARA EHRENREICHSo why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
BARBARA EHRENREICHFeminists have not tried to “destroy the family”. We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.
BARBARA EHRENREICHTake 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 EHRENREICHThe fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
BARBARA EHRENREICHIt is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.
BARBARA EHRENREICHThere’s more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
BARBARA EHRENREICHWhen I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
BARBARA EHRENREICHThere seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment — anywhere.
BARBARA EHRENREICH