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in 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.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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
Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Innovation Public Speaking Stranger
Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we’ve made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we’ve loved it to death.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Earth Expectations Need Pandas Rush
Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Character Motivation Poverty
the fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical ‘name it and claim it’ variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one’s immediate, self-identified needs.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Exist Magical Name Need Self
Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Exercise Fitness Health
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
… there hasn’t been a serious life-style trend since the couch potato was sighted, in about 1986, on one of its rare forays to the video store. Cocooning remains a significant mass enterprise, encouraged by the availability of five hundred new cable channels and microwavable popcorn.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Availability Popcorn Style
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

Coercion Long Men
The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Fashion Halfhearted Many Other Possible Truth
The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Atheism Gun Party
The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Cancer Disease Thinking
A 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 EHRENREICH

Purpose Real Years
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Leader Motherhood Work
You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there’s no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Group Men Suspect Teenager Turn
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

in 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.

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Popular Authors

in 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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