The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.” –Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.
BARBARA EHRENREICHI have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that’s really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it’s very different. You’re out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn’t that fascinating.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
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America is addicted to wars of distraction.
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There’s more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
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Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your ‘job.’ Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.
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The secret of the truly successful … is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.
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There 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.
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Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
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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.
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Marriage is socialism among two people.
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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.
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The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.
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To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.
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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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For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.
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So 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 EHRENREICH