Of 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 EHRENREICHin our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm – a bland and neutral mainstream – from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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while everything else in our lives has gotten simpler, speedier, more microwavable and user-friendly, child-raising seems to have expanded to fill the time no longer available for it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Money does not bring happiness’ – only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.
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Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.
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In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.
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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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
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Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
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Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it’s intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
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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.
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If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other peoples, then that must feel pretty good.
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If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.
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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.
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Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.
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Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.
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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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH