Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody’s mom in that she knows what’s best for us. But if you look at the historical record—Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages—you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: World
In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory—horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene—and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Science Fiction
Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production—only to produce a race of bed-wetters!
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Creation
Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won’t cry when she’s knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn’t allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Men & Women, Women, Men
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better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.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
Topics: Innovation
The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Liberalism
My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography
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.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Mothers
Marriage is socialism among two people.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Marriage, Reputation
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.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Women, Feminism
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: AIDS
If men were equally at risk from this condition—if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains—then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Birth, Pregnancy
Someone has to stand up for wimps.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Men
If men were equally at risk from this condition – if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains – then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Pregnancy
The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Politicians, Politics
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Evolution
Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Exercise
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.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Drugs
The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well. The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Effort
Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch. The barriers are ancient—perhaps rooted, as some paleontologist may soon discover, in the contrast between the occasional guttural utterances exchanged in male hunting bands and the extended discussions characteristic of female food-gathering groups.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Men & Women, Men, Women
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: War
In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Twentieth Century
Surely there must be some way to find a husband or, for that matter, merely an escort, without sacrificing one’s privacy, self-respect, and interior decorating scheme. For example, men could be imported from the developing countries, many parts of which are suffering from a man excess, at least in relation to local food supply.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Relationships
Personally, I can’t see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Husbands, Marriage
It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and a need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Christianity
A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Children
Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goats cheese… get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Eating, Food
If that’s how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what’s left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a whole bunch of cinders (one of which is, fortunately, still hot enough and close enough to be good for tanning).
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Universe, The Universe
Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids—without any social relevance or human responsibility at all.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Science, Scientists
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Nora Ephron American Filmmaker
- Dave Barry American Humorist
- Linus Pauling American Scientist, Peace Activist
- Gore Vidal American Novelist
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
- Alice Walker American Novelist, Activist
- Andre Norton American Science Fiction Writer
Leave a Reply