Barbara Ehrenreich America Quotations

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

Both 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.

No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.

A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America

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.

There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.

There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans--who were not allowed to learn to read and write--and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.

we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

The discovery of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the discovery of America almost 500 years earlier. In the case of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.

To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born "illegals."

Once you do lose a job, there are not a lot of social supports for you. You lose health insurance because we have this absurd system in America where health insurance is usually tied to employment. Your income dips. And that's when you get into selling the house.

The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.