American journalist, essayist, and one of the most sustained voices for the American working class and its unromanticized conditions in the late-20th- and early-21st-century press. Trained as a scientist — Ph.D. in cellular immunology from Rockefeller — Ehrenreich turned early to writing and spent the next fifty years producing books and essays across a wide register (political journalism, feminist theory, science, class analysis, immersive reporting, personal essay) unified by a consistent, plainspoken, often funny refusal of the official American stories about work, health, optimism, and who deserves what.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) is the book for which she is most widely known. Under an assumed name, using only the money she could earn at the jobs she could get, Ehrenreich worked for several months each as a waitress in Florida, a hotel housekeeper and house cleaner in Maine, and a Walmart sales associate in Minnesota — and wrote up the experience with the methodical attention of someone who had been a scientist and the moral clarity of someone who refused the consolatory readings available. The conclusion was simple and unsparing: that full-time low-wage work in the United States cannot, at the end of the 1990s economic expansion, support housing and a minimally dignified life; that the language of "welfare reform" and "personal responsibility" then dominating American political speech was a fiction inconsistent with the actual arithmetic of the lives it was imposed on. The book was a bestseller and has been assigned in college courses continuously for a generation.
Her earlier work prefigured many of its themes. The Hearts of Men (1983) traced the postwar male revolt from the breadwinner role; Fear of Falling (1989) analyzed the American professional middle class's anxieties about its own declining security; Blood Rites (1997) asked what it is in human beings that enables and enjoys war. Bait and Switch (2005) applied the Nickel and Dimed method to the white-collar job market. Bright-Sided (2009), written out of her own experience with breast cancer, is an acid examination of the American ideology of positive thinking — the pink-ribbon industry and the broader demand that the afflicted perform cheerful gratitude for the economic and medical conditions their affliction was in part produced by. Natural Causes (2018) was her late, bracing meditation on medicine, aging, and the refusal to pretend that any amount of wellness-discipline will keep us from dying.