Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

Obviously, personal responsibility is important. But there's no evidence that people who are poor are less ambitious than anyone else. In fact, many work long hours at backbreaking jobs.

A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.

The whole contention lies between those that labor for a living and those that do not.

If any man tells you that he loves America yet he hates labor, then that man is a liar.

No human being has the right to be idle... Women must, as children of God, be trained to do some work in the world.

Once middle-class white women began to emancipate themselves and get involved in public and political life… abortion took on its modern meaning of self-determination and active decision making. Those are bedrock American values for men, but not for women, who are supposed to be self-sacrificing, other-oriented, maternal, and dependent.

I'm far too middle-class to morally object to a paying job.

I want my girls to grow up learning that it is important their mum worked like a man.

Shakti' moves on various levels - love in Canada, feudalism in India and, above all, a mother's fierce fight against her father-in-law to wrest back custody of her child.

Our religion has defined a position for women (in society): motherhood. Some people can understand this, while others can't. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't accept the concept of motherhood.

I believe in workers rights when people are doing a good job. If somebody needs support I am always there, but if they're taking the piss, I am hard on them.

When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth - that men are only equal - can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth.

I've been baking bread and looking after the baby...Everyone else who has asked me that question over the last few years says. 'But what else have you been doing?' To which I say, 'Are you kidding?' Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. After I made the loaves [of bread,] I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus, don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?

Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby.

They are but beggars that can count their worth.

We women don't care too much about getting our pictures on money as long as we can get our hands on it.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.

That's not what I want my children to hear. That's not representative of the country that I want my children to grow up in. And so that actually I found far more upsetting as a mom, as a woman, as an American, and even as my mother's daughter than anything they said about my mom.

None but those who work are entitled to eat.

If fighting for working families is playing the women's card, you know what, deal me in.

I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.

So this is feminist corner then.

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

[Woman's] life-long economic parasitism has utterly blurred her conception of the meaning of equality.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.