Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of ‘traditional values’ installed. … the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
BARBARA EHRENREICHSometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of ‘traditional values’ installed. … the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
BARBARA EHRENREICHExercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
BARBARA EHRENREICHCheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.
BARBARA EHRENREICHThe 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 EHRENREICHUpscale 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.
BARBARA EHRENREICHAnyone 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better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.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 EHRENREICHIf 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.
BARBARA EHRENREICHPersonally, I can’t see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
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 EHRENREICHIt seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
BARBARA EHRENREICHWell 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.
BARBARA EHRENREICHBut our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.
BARBARA EHRENREICHWhen you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.
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 EHRENREICHMarriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH