芭芭拉·艾伦瑞克

芭芭拉·艾伦瑞克（英语：Barbara Ehrenreich，/ˈɛərənraɪk/ AIR-ən-rike；1941年8月26日—2022年9月1日）是一名美国作家、政治活动家、美国民主社会主义者，以揭发丑闻著称，出版了20多部著作，名作是2001年出版的《我在底层的生活——当专栏作家化身女服务生》（Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America），书中她以最低工资生活了三个月。

生平

她出生于美国蒙大拿州比尤特，家教很严，不信仰任何宗教。其母是一个自由民主党人，经常谈论种族不公问题，其父是一名矿工，后成为吉列公司高管。她曾在里德学院学习物理学，后转学化学，1963年毕业，1968年进入洛克菲勒大学学习理论物理学，后转学细胞免疫学。

毕业后，她没有继续进行科学研究，而是进入纽约市预算局（Bureau of the Budget）和健康政策咨询中心（Health Policy Advisory Center）担任分析师，后成为纽约州立大学老韦斯特伯里分校助理教授。1972年，她开始教授女性健康课程，并投身女性健康相关的社会运动。

Barbara Ehrenreich (AIR-ən-rike; née Alexander; August 26, 1941 – September 1, 2022) was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books.

Ehrenreich is best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the Erasmus Prize.

Early life

Ehrenreich was born to Isabelle (née Oxley) and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town". In an interview on C-SPAN, she characterized her parents as "strong union people" with two family rules: "never cross a picket line and never vote Republican". In a talk she gave in 1999, Ehrenreich called herself a "fourth-generation atheist".

Later in life, she wrote that she rejected "the God of monotheism" because of the philosophical problem of a being that was all good and all powerful, when people were living with "all the misery he allowed or instigated". She had mystical experiences throughout her life, which she identified as belonging to a type of animism rather than theism.

"As a little girl", she told The New York Times in 1993, "I would go to school and have to decide if my parents were the evil people they were talking about, part of the Red Menace we read about in the Weekly Reader, just because my mother was a liberal Democrat who would always talk about racial injustice." Her mother was a deeply unhappy homemaker. Her father was a copper miner who went to the Montana School of Mines (renamed Montana Technological University in 2018) and then to Carnegie Mellon University. A high-functioning alcoholic, he strongly valued intelligence.

After her father graduated from the Montana School of Mines, the family moved to Pittsburgh, New York, and Massachusetts, before settling down in Los Angeles. He eventually became a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation. Her parents later divorced.

Ehrenreich studied physics at Reed College, switched to chemistry, graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis was Electrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode. In 1968, she enrolled in a theoretical physics Ph.D, but changed early on to cellular immunology and received her Ph.D at Rockefeller University.

In 1970, Ehrenreich gave birth to her daughter Rosa in a public clinic in New York. "I was the only white patient at the clinic, and I found out this was the health care women got," she told The Globe and Mail newspaper in 1987, "They induced my labor because it was late in the evening and the doctor wanted to go home. I was enraged. The experience made me a feminist."

Career

After completing her doctorate, Ehrenreich did not pursue a career in science. Instead, she worked first as an analyst with the Bureau of the Budget in New York City and with the Health Policy Advisory Center, and later as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.

In 1972, Ehrenreich began co-teaching a course on women and health with feminist journalist and academic Deirdre English. Through the rest of the seventies, Ehrenreich worked mostly in health-related research, advocacy and activism, including co-writing, with English, several feminist books and pamphlets on the history and politics of women's health. During this period she began speaking frequently at conferences staged by women's health centers and women's groups, by universities, and by the United States government. She also spoke regularly about socialist feminism and about feminism in general.

Together with her then husband, John Ehrenreich, she coined the term "professional-managerial class" in 1977.