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#Barbara Ehrenreich
haggishlyhagging · 10 months
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“By 1900 child mortality was already declining—not because of anything the medical profession had accomplished, but because of general improvements in sanitation and nutrition. Meanwhile the birthrate had dropped to an average of about three and a half; women expected each baby to live and were already taking measures to prevent more than the desired number of pregnancies. From a strictly biological standpoint then, children were beginning to come into their own.
Economic changes too pushed the child into sudden prominence at the turn of the century. Those fabled, pre-industrial children who were "seen, but not heard," were, most of the time, hard at work—weeding, sewing, fetching water and kindling, feeding the animals, watching the baby. Today, a four-year-old who can tie his or her own shoes is impressive. In colonial times, four-year-old girls knitted stockings and mittens and could produce intricate embroidery; at age six they spun wool. A good, industrious little girl was called "Mrs." instead of "Miss" in appreciation of her contribution to the family economy: she was not, strictly speaking, a child.
But when production left the houschold, sweeping away the dozens of chores which had filled the child's day, childhood began to stand out as a distinct and fascinating phase of life. It was as if the late Victorian imagination, still unsettled by Darwin's apes, suddenly looked down and discovered, right at knee-level, the evolutionary missing link. Here was the pristine innocence which adult men romanticized, and of course, here, in miniature, was the future which today's adult men could not hope to enter in person. In the child lay the key to the control of human evolution. Its habits, its pastimes, its companions were no longer trivial matters, but issues of gravest importance to the entire species.
This sudden fascination with the child came at a time in American history when child abuse—in the most literal and physical sense—was becoming an institutional feature of the expanding industrial economy. Near the turn of the century, an estimated 2,250,000 American children under fifteen were full-time laborers—in coal mines, glass factories, textile mills, canning factories, in the cigar industry, and in the homes of the wealthy—in short, wherever cheap and docile labor could be used. There can be no comparison between the conditions of work for a farm child (who was also in most cases a beloved family member) and the conditions of work for industrial child laborers. Four-year-olds worked sixteen-hour days sorting beads or rolling cigars in New York City tenements; five-year-old girls worked the night shift in southern cotton mills.
So long as enough girls can be kept working, and only a few of them faint, the mills are kept going; but when faintings are so many and so frequent that it does not pay to keep going, the mills are closed.
These children grew up hunched and rickety, sometimes blinded by fine work or the intense heat of furnaces, lungs ruined by coal dust or cotton dust—when they grew up at all. Not for them the "century of the child," or childhood in any form:
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
Child labor had its ideological defenders: educational philosophers who extolled the lessons of factory discipline, the Catholic hierarchy which argued that it was a father's patriarchal right to dispose of his children's labor, and of course the mill owners themselves. But for the reform-oriented, middle-class citizen the spectacle of machines tearing at baby flesh, of factories sucking in files of hunched-over children each morning, inspired not only public indignation, but a kind of personal horror. Here was the ultimate "rationalization" contained in the logic of the Market: all members of the family reduced alike to wage slavery, all human relations, including the most ancient and intimate, dissolved in the cash nexus. Who could refute the logic of it? There was no rationale (within the terms of the Market) for supporting idle, dependent children. There were no ties of economic self-interest to preserve the family. Child labor represented a long step toward that ultimate "anti-utopia" which always seemed to be germinating in capitalist development: a world engorged by the Market, a world without love.”
-Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women
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gatheringbones · 1 year
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[“Years ago, the kindly fry cook who trained me to waitress at a Los Angeles truck stop used to say: Never make an unnecessary trip; if you don’t have to walk fast, walk slow; if you don’t have to walk, stand. But at Jerry’s the effort of distinguishing necessary from unnecessary and urgent from whenever would itself be too much of an energy drain. The only thing to do is to treat each shift as a one-time-only emergency: you’ve got fifty starving people out there, lying scattered on the battlefield, so get out there and feed them! Forget that you will have to do this again tomorrow, forget that you will have to be alert enough to dodge the drunks on the drive home tonight—just burn, burn, burn! Ideally, at some point you enter what servers call a “rhythm” and psychologists term a “flow state,” where signals pass from the sense organs directly to the muscles, bypassing the cerebral cortex, and a Zen-like emptiness sets in. I’m on a 2:00–10:00 P.M. shift now, and a male server from the morning shift tells me about the time he “pulled a triple”—three shifts in a row, all the way around the clock—and then got off and had a drink and met this girl, and maybe he shouldn’t tell me this, but they had sex right then and there and it was like beautiful. But there’s another capacity of the neuromuscular system, which is pain. I start tossing back drugstore-brand ibuprofens as if they were vitamin C, four before each shift, because an old mouse-related repetitive-stress injury in my upper back has come back to full-spasm strength, thanks to the tray carrying. In my ordinary life, this level of disability might justify a day of ice packs and stretching. Here I comfort myself with the Aleve commercial where the cute blue-collar guy asks: If you quit after working four hours, what would your boss say? And the not-so-cute blue-collar guy, who’s lugging a metal beam on his back, answers: He’d fire me, that’s what. But fortunately, the commercial tells us, we workers can exert the same kind of authority over our painkillers that our bosses exert over us. If Tylenol doesn’t want to work for more than four hours, you just fire its ass and switch to Aleve.”]
barbara ehrenreich, from nickel and dimed: on (not) getting by in america, 2002
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mysharona1987 · 2 years
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b1tch-calling-you-out · 7 months
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Just finished reading Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English for free on Internet Archive! ⭐⭐⭐⭐
❝Women have always been healers, and medicine has always been an arena of struggle between female practitioners and male professionals. This pamphlet explores two important phases in the male takeover of health care: the suppression of witches in medieval Europe and the rise of the male medical profession in the United States. The authors conclude that despite efforts to exclude them, the resurgence of women as healers should be a long-range goal of the women’s movement.❞
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thegodwhocums · 1 year
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Ours is what the French theorist Guy Debord called the "society of the spectacle," which he described as occurring in "an epoch without festivals." Instead of generating their own collective pleasures, people absorb, or consume, the spectacles of commercial entertainment, nationalist rituals, and the consumer culture, with its endless advertisements for the pleasure of individual ownership. Debord bemoaned the passivity engendered by constant spectatorship, announcing that "the spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep."
Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
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dk-thrive · 1 year
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just the chance... to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneously existence
The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress... The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression.
Why not reclaim our distinctly human heritage as creature generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting, and dance ... There is no 'point' to it -- no religious overtones, ideological message, or money to be made -- just the chance, which we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration."
—  Barbara Ehrenreich, "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Holt Paperbacks; December 26, 2007) (via Alive on All Channels)
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phantomfingers · 10 months
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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.
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itssophietexas · 1 year
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i mostly read nonfiction or informational books and tied for favorite are
Unmasking Autism by Devon Price and Bright-sided by Barbara Ehrenreich
UA is pretty self explanatory but it’s one of the best informational books on Autism i’ve found, made better since it’s by and autistic person!
Bright-Sided is about the negative side of positivity thinking. it sounds doom and gloom but it’s really not. it discusses the origins of positivity culture in puritan america and how it transformed into a capitalist ploy.
i don’t talk about this often but during the pandemic i went through what is often described as “spiritual psychosis”. i don’t feel super comfortable describing it yet, but i found this book to be a breath of fresh air to all the self help books i consumed.
it’s a fascinating read and it really helped me put things into perspective!
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birilio · 6 months
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Smile or Die
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big-low-t · 3 months
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Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us. - Barbara Ehrenreich
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Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English - Le Streghe Siamo Noi - La Salamandra - 1975
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haggishlyhagging · 10 months
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“Dr. Edward H. Clarke's book Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls was the great uterine manifeso of the nineteenth century. It appeared at the height of the pressure for co-education at Harvard, where Clarke was a professor, and went through seventeen editions in the space of a few years. Clarke reviewed the medical theories of female nature—the innate frailty of women, the brain-uterus competition—and concluded, with startling but unassailable logic, that higher education would cause women's uteruses to atrophy!
Armed with Clarke's arguments, doctors agitated vociferously against the dangers of female education. R. R. Coleman, M.D., of Birmingham, Alabama, thundered this warning:
Women beware. You are on the brink of destruction: You have hitherto been engaged in crushing your waists; now you are attempting to cultivate your mind: You have been merely dancing all night in the foul air of the ballroom; now you are beginning to spend your mornings in study. You have been incessantly stimulating your emotions with concerts and operas, with French plays, and French novels; now you are exerting your understanding to learn Greek, and solve propositions in Euclid. Beware!! Science pronounces that the woman who studies is lost.
Dozens of medical researchers rushed in to plant the banner of science on the territory opened up by Clarke's book. Female students, their studies showed, were pale, in delicate health, and prey to monstrous deviations from menstrual regularity. (Menstrual irregularity upset the doctor's sensibilities as much as female sexuality. Both were evidences of spontaneous, ungovernable forces at work in the female flesh.) A 1902 study showed that 42 per cent of the women admitted to insane asylums were well educated compared to only 16 per cent of the men—“proving,”obviously, that higher education was driving women crazy. But the consummate evidence was the college woman's dismal contribution to the birth rate. An 1895 study found that 28 per cent of female college graduates married, compared to 80 per cent of women in general. The birth rate was falling among white middle-class people in general, and most precipitously among the college educated. G. Stanley Hall, whose chapter on "Adolescent Girls and their Education" reviewed thirty years of medical arguments against female education, concluded with uncharacteristic sarcasm that the colleges were doing fine if their aim was to train "those who do not marry or if they are to educate for celibacy." "These institutions may perhaps come to be training stations of a new-old type, the agamic or agenic [i.e., sterile] woman, be she aunt, maid—old or young—nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman."”
-Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women
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gatheringbones · 1 year
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[“I had been gloating internally about my ability to keep up with, and sometimes outwork, women twenty or thirty years younger than myself, but it turns out this comparative advantage says less about me than it does about them. Ours is a physical bond, to the extent that we bond at all. One person’s infirmity can be a teammate’s extra burden; there’s a constant traffic in herbal and over-the-counter solutions to pain.
If I don’t know how my coworkers survive on their wages or what they make of our hellish condition, I do know about their back pains and cramps and arthritic attacks. Lori and Pauline are excused from vacuuming on account of their backs, which means you dread being assigned to a team with them. Helen has a bum foot, which Ted, in explaining her absence one day, blames on the cheap, ill-fitting shoes that, he implies, she perversely chooses to wear. Marge’s arthritis makes scrubbing a torture; another woman has to see a physical therapist for her rotator cuff. When Rosalie tells me that she got her shoulder problem picking blueberries as a “kid”—she still is one in my eyes, of course—I flash on a scene from my own childhood, of wandering through fields on an intense July day, grabbing berries by the handful as I go. But when Rosalie was a kid she worked in the blueberry fields of northern Maine, and the damage to her shoulder is an occupational injury.
So ours is a world of pain—managed by Excedrin and Advil, compensated for with cigarettes and, in one or two cases and then only on weekends, with booze. Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect? Would they be bothered if they did know, or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased—boasting to dinner guests, for example, that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears?
In one of my few exchanges with an owner, a pert muscular woman whose desk reveals that she works part-time as a personal trainer, I am vacuuming and she notices the sweat. “That’s a real workout, isn’t it?” she observes, not unkindly, and actually offers me a glass of water, the only such offer I ever encounter. Flouting the rule against the ingestion of anything while inside a house, I take it, leaving an inch undrunk to avoid the awkwardness of a possible refill offer. “I tell all my clients,” the trainer informs me, “‘If you want to be fit, just fire your cleaning lady and do it yourself.’” “Ho ho,” is all I say, since we’re not just chatting in the gym together and I can’t explain that this form of exercise is totally asymmetrical, brutally repetitive, and as likely to destroy the musculoskeletal structure as to strengthen it.”]
barbara ehrenreich, from nickel and dimed: on (not) getting by in america, 2002
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[my flickr archive]
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"The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress... The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression.
Why not reclaim our distinctly human heritage as creature generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting, and dance ... There is no 'point' to it -- no religious overtones, ideological message, or money to be made -- just the chance , which we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration."
-Barbara Ehrenreich, "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy"
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thegodwhocums · 1 year
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But compared to the danced religions of the past, today's "faiths" are often pallid affairs—if only by virtue of the very fact that they are "faiths," dependent on, and requiring, belief as opposed to direct knowledge. The prehistoric ritual dancer, the maenad or practitioner of Vodou, did not believe in her god or gods; she knew them, because, at the height of group ecstasy, they filled her with their presence. Modern Christians may have similar experiences, but the primary requirement of their religion is belief, meaning an effort of the imagination. Dionysus, in contrast, did not ask his followers for their belief or faith; he called on them to apprehend him directly, to let him enter, in all his madness and glory, their bodies and their minds.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
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