Marriage 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 EHRENREICHRacist, sexist, and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion, education and exposure to the other guy’s-or excuse me, woman’s-point of view.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.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 -
It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn’t give a damn.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
There’s more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don’t need to have hierarchy so much.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
When someone works for less pay than she can live on – when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently – then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions … It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.
BARBARA EHRENREICH