Barbara Ehrenreich

In 1966, she married John Ehrenreich, a clinical psychologist whom she met during an anti-war activism campaign in New York City. The couple published several books concerning health policy and labor issues together. They are blessed with two children; a daughter, Rosa, born in 1970 and a son, Ben, born in 1972. The couple got divorced in 1977.

In 1983, she married Gary Stevenson, a union organizer for the Teamsters. They got divorced in 1993.

She was born Barbara Alexander on August 26, 1941 in Butte, Montana, to Ben Howes Alexander, a copper miner and his wife, Isabelle Oxley. She has one brother, Ben Alexander Jr., and one sister, Diane Alexander. Her parents later got divorced.

Her father attended the Montana State School of Mines and later received education from the Carnegie Mellon University and eventually became a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation.

She enrolled at the Reed College where she initially studied chemistry but later majored in physics, graduating in 1963. Then she attended Rockefeller University in theoretical physics but later switched to biology. In 1968, she obtained her PhD in cellular immunology.

After completing her doctorate, she served as an analyst with the Bureau of the Budget in New York City and with the Health Policy Advisory Center. She was influenced by the anti-Vietnam war movement and started doing investigative stories for a small charitable group in New York which advocated for better health care for the city's poor.

During her pregnancy, she experienced a dreadful form of sexism and later got involved with the ‘women's health movement’ which worked for better health care for women. Eventually, she decided to quit her teaching job and became a full-time writer.

Her earlier literary works include ‘Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers’ (1972) and ‘For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Expert’s Advice to Women’ (1978) with Deirdre English.

From 1979 to 1981, she served as a professor at New York University, the University of Missouri at Columbia and Sangamon State University.

Her later works include ‘Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex’ (1986) with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs and ‘The Mean Season: The Attack on Social Welfare’ (1987) with Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward, and Fred Block.

One of her most acclaimed works is ‘Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class’, which was published and nominated for a National Book Critics’ Award in 1989.

One of her most celebrated works is ‘Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America’ published in 2001. It investigates the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States from her perspective as an undercover journalist.