Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘myth busting’ writer and activist, dies

NEW YORK (AP) — Barbara Ehrenreich, the author, activist and self-described “myth buster” who in such notable works as “Nickel and Dimed” and “Bait and Switch” challenged conventional thinking about class, religion and the very idea of an American dream, has died at age 81.

Ehrenreich died Thursday morning in Alexandria, Virginia, according to her son, the author and journalist Ben Ehrenreich. She had recently suffered a stroke.

She was born Barbara Alexander in Butte, Montana, and raised in a household of union supporters. She studied physics as an undergraduate at Reed College, and received a PhD in immunology at Rockefeller University.

Starting in the 1970s, she worked as a teacher and researcger and became increasingly active in the feminist movement, from writing pamphlets to appearing at conferences around the country.

A prolific author who regularly turned out books and newspaper and magazine articles, Ehrenreich honed an accessible prose style that brought her a wide readership for otherwise unsettling and unsentimental ideas. She disdained individualism, organized religion, unregulated economics and what Norman Vincent Peale famously called “the power of positive thinking.” A proponent of liberal causes from unions to abortion rights, Ehrenreich often drew upon her own experiences to communicate her ideas. The birth of her daughter Rosa helped inspired her to become a feminist, she later explained, because she was appalled at the hospital’s treatment of patients.

Her battle with breast cancer years ago inspired her 2009 book “Bright-Sided,” in which she recalled the bland platitudes and assurances of well wishers and probed the American insistence — a religion, she called it — on optimism, to the point of ignoring the country’s many troubles.

“We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking,” she wrote.

“Positive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy. If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure. The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility.”

For “Nickel and Dimed,” one of her best known books, she worked in minimum wage jobs so she could learn firsthand the struggles of the working poor, whom she called “the major philanthropists of our society.”