Notable Writer: Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Notable Writer: Barbara Ehrenreich BARBARA EHRENREICH is a political essayist and social critic who tackles a brave and diverse range of issues in books and magazine articles. She is the author or co-author of twelve books including Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, and, most recently, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. She has written for dozens of magazines, including Ms., Harper's, The Nation, The Progressive, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times Magazine. Her forthcoming book is called Nickle and Dimed: Surviving in Low-Wage America. She recently led a workshop, Writing About Poverty, for the literary nonfiction program's Writing About series.   Q: Many of us are trying to break into the professional world of freelancing. Do you remember your first professional published article? A: It was in a professional biological journal. I was a graduate student in biology, ended up getting a Ph.D., and the first things I ever published were in the professional literature, all in the passive voice, by the way. Which was sort of required. I didn't have any intention of becoming a writer. It kind of crept up on me because, after the Ph.D., I decided not to become a research scientist and just wanted to be involved in social change activities and often ended up doing writing as part of that work. It could be a leaflet, could be an investigative article published in a small newsletter, but I didn't think of myself as a writer for quite a while.   Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a science background? A: The disadvantage is that I didn't spend years studying history or political science or something that would have come in more handy. But I'm not sorry really. It gives me a way of seeing the world, an analytical strength. Another thing: I'm not afraid of anything technical. I have the feeling, which I should hope every journalist develops, I can learn anything . . . It does shape the way I see the world, sometimes in odd ways. Looking for mechanisms, looking for ways things fit together. A lot of my analogies and metaphors come from science.   Q: How did you break into writing for magazines like Ms. and Harper's? A: The first national magazine I ever wrote for was Ms. Magazine in the late 1970s. I had a sort of a specialty at the time which I can no longer claim, which was health care issues. Both health policy and sort of anything health related. So they had asked me to do a women's health related article.   Q: Would you encourage beginning writers to develop specialty areas? A: It's not a bad idea. It gives you more of an entree when you don't have a big stack of clips. And it's important to learn something deeply. You can always branch out.   Q: Where do you get your story ideas? A: From two sources... Something that makes me angry -- and a lot of things make me angry -- so there's a lot of material. And the other source, the other inspiration, is curiosity. Why'd I write about war? Well, I certainly have emotional feeling about war- negative ones. But also I was really, really curious.   Q: Is it difficult to keep your political views and your integrity and still publish in the mainstream? A: Yes, it sure is. It's frustrating. News has become more like entertainment. once staid news magazines, which will go unnamed, have become more frivolous and less interested in serious analysis. There are problems writing about poverty. The mainstream media are not very interested. From 1991 to about 1997 I was a regular essayist in Time, meaning I had an essay in about once a month. But then a new administration came in about 1997 and they started rejecting the pieces I did on things like poverty, inequality, capital punishment, and only wanting me to do things on Monica, Princess Di, things like that. So, I won't work for them on a regular basis now.   Q: Is it hard to write about issues you feel so passionate about? A: My traditional way of dealing with that is humor. Humor actually can be a way of expressing a lot of aggression. I mean, satirical humor. And I used it for years. Nobody wants to hear a rant.   Q: How do you balance your work writing books and writing for magazines? A: I find it sort of essential psychologically. The great thing about journalism is the changes of subject and new challenges all the time. But that's also the problem with it. And I like having a long-term project too, which has continuity and which I can always dip back into and sometimes devote months of my time to. So I like having both.   Q: What are you working on now? A: There are two books. one will be about these low-wage jobs. one chapter of that appeared in Harper's (Nickled and Dimed). The other book I haven't found a good way to describe. It is the role of festivity, and communal festivity, in social and political movements. That makes it sound drier than it actually is. It goes all the way into rituals and occasions for ecstasy, ecstatic behavior. It's a lot of fun, and it's hard to research.   Q: Other advice for beginning writers? A: Writing is, first of all, something you do for yourself. Don't get caught up into the marketability of everything and just hustling to make money. Now, that's part of it, but I think it's very important to have a part of your writing be experimental, be perhaps private and something that may take years . . . You get hollowed out real fast if you feel this is just something that's a trick you do to earn some money.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://lnf.uoregon.edu/notable/ehrenreich.html

 

 

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The Progressive | May 2002 Issue

Flip Side Barbara Ehrenreich
Chamber of Welfare Reform

It was hard to miss the racism and misogyny that helped motivate welfare reform,
which is about to come up for reauthorization by Congress. The stereotype of the
welfare recipient--lazy, overweight, and endlessly fecund--had been a coded way
of talking about African Americans at least since George Wallace's 1968
Presidential campaign.

As for misogyny, where to begin? The Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 bears within it the assumption that
families headed by single mothers are inherently defective, and not only on
account of their relative poverty. In the rhetorical build-up to welfare reform,
Republicans also sought to "restigmatize" out-of-wedlock births as
"illegitimate," implying that only a male--the father--could confer
respectability on a child. Bush's recent proposal for the reauthorization of
welfare reform takes the gender politics to a lurid new low: $300 million would
be allocated to encourage recipients to get married--to someone, anyone, as soon
as possible.

One could not help but note, in the original arguments of welfare reform
ideologues like author George Gilder and the Heritage Foundation's Robert
Rector, an obsessive fascination with female sexuality, especially the sexuality
of women of color. In the reformers' view, welfare recipients were moral
outlaws, and they were this way because welfare supported them in their
slovenly, sexually indulgent ways. Even welfare itself was sexualized in the
reformers' overheated imaginations: It had "cuckholded" black men, usurping
their rightful place as breadwinners, leaving them emasculated and demoralized.

But there was always a more rational, economically calculating motivation behind
welfare reform, represented by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, which hailed the 1996 legislation as a reaffirmation of "America's
work ethic." By supporting mothers to stay home with their children, welfare had
supposedly been undermining this ethic--never mind that raising children in
poverty is itself a tricky and exhausting job, or that most welfare recipients,
even before "reform," held jobs on and off to supplement their meager benefits.
The business supporters of welfare reform wanted regular, paid employment to be
understood as the only form of work worthy of respect and recognition.

The rhetoric surrounding welfare reform helped establish this extremely narrow,
and, one might say, anti-family, point of view. People without jobs--paid jobs,
that is--were routinely described as "parasites" who were content to loll around
at the "public trough." This kind of talk, reiterated throughout the quarter
century leading up to welfare reform, established the notion that paid work of
any kind is a "contribution" to the larger society, while caring for one's
family members is a form of self-indulgence. In the "job-readiness" programs
routinely inflicted on welfare recipients since 1996, poor women have it drummed
into them that by getting a job they will win "self-esteem" and, at the same
time, finally be able to provide a suitable "role model" for their children.

Stigmatizing unemployment--or, more accurately, unpaid, family-directed
labor--obviously works to promote the kind of docility businesses crave in their
employees. Any job, no matter how dangerous, abusive, or poorly paid, can be
construed as better than no job at all. TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families, as reformed welfare is called) does not, of course, rely on an
intangible "ethic" to promote work; it requires recipients to take whatever jobs
are available, and usually the first job that comes along. Lose the job--because
you have to stay home with a sick child, for example--and you may lose whatever
supplementary benefits you were receiving. The message is clear: Do not complain
or make trouble; accept employment on the bosses' terms or risk homelessness and
hunger.

So race and gender are not the only dimensions of welfare reform as a political
issue. From a rational, economic point of view, welfare reform has been an
effort to provide American business with disciplined--and in most cases,
desperate--workers. The disciplining effect goes well beyond TANF recipients
themselves: Other workers are also susceptible to the harsh Calvinistic ideology
that accompanied welfare reform and dictates passive obedience in the workplace.
Furthermore, their attempts, if any, to fight for better conditions and pay can
potentially be undercut by the absence of a safety net for those who might be
fired as troublemakers.

Welfare reform can be understood, then, as one of several initiatives launched
against American workers by their employers in the wave of class warfare that
began in the 1970s. It was in that decade that business leaders, alarmed by the
sudden growth of foreign competition, began to see American workers as overpaid,
under-productive, and spoiled. This perception was reinforced by a series of
militant strikes that swept America in the late '60s and early '70s, which, in
some particularly daring cases, even included demands for worker participation
in decision-making.

Management responded, first, with heightened supervision in the workplace,
extending, in our own time, to video and electronic surveillance of employees'
actions, phone calls, and computer use. White collar workers may find their
e-mail monitored; data entry workers may have their key strokes counted; anyone
can have his or her purse or backpack searched at any time.

Next came an even more intimate form of surveillance--drug testing--which was
almost universally adopted by large employers in the '80s, despite the fact that
it has no demonstrated effect on absenteeism or productivity. Along with
pre-employment personality testing, drug testing serves to put the employee on
notice that he or she must meet the same rigid standards of discipline and
obedience, whether on the job or off.

Union-busting is another anti-worker initiative that has taken off in just the
last couple of decades, to the point where employers now spend an estimated $1
billion a year on it. According to the AFL-CIO, 80 percent of employers today
hire union-busting "consultants" when confronted with an organizing drive, and
30 percent fire union activists, although the latter practice is entirely
illegal.

The combination of union-busting, heightened workplace surveillance, and
intrusive forms of testing has made the American workplace, and especially the
low-wage workplace, into a dictatorship in which all normal civil liberties are
suspended. Thanks to welfare reform, fewer people can hope to escape from it.

So welfare reform has an impact that goes well beyond the twelve million
people--mostly children--who were receiving benefits before 1996. To the extent
that welfare served as a shield, however inadequate, against the worst forms of
workplace exploitation, welfare was and remains a class issue. Racism and
misogyny helped blind many to this fact six years ago, when welfare reform was
passed, but we cannot let that happen again.

TANF reauthorization creates a precious opportunity to reform welfare reform,
and this will require a determined effort on the part of everyone
affected--which is just about all of us.

-- Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive and the author of
"Nickel and Dimed: on (Not) Getting By in America" (Metropolitan Books, 2001).

 

 

 

 

 

The Progressive magazine
http://www.progressive.org