March 8, 2005
Journalist and social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich delivers the eye-opening lecture Nickel and Dimed—On (Not) Getting By in America at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Barbara Ehrenreich
- Nickel and Dimed—On (Not) Getting By in America
- Ehrenreich’s lecture is based on her bestselling book about the working poor
- A prolific, award-winning journalist, her work has appeared in Time, Harper’s, The Nation, The Progressive and The New York Times
- She is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the College of Creative Studies
- Monday, April 11
- 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public $10 / UCSB students $8
- Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
Author/journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, one of our most acclaimed and original social commentators, will deliver the lecture Nickel and Dimed—On (Not) Getting By in America on Monday, April 11 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. Like the bestselling book on which the presentation is based, this lecture will reveal low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety and surprising generosity. Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages and Ehrenreich decided to join them, inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform that promised that any job equals a better life. To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide and Wal-Mart associate. She soon discovered that even the “lowliest” occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. She also learned one job was not enough to survive. The New York Times Book Review called the book “valuable and illuminating,” claiming, “We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news of America’s working poor so clearly and directly, and conveying it with a deep moral outrage....She is our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism.”
Ehrenreich received the Sydney Hillman Award for Journalism and a Brill’s Content “Honorable Mention” for a chapter of Nickel and Dimed that appeared in Harper’s in January 1999. A second essay entitled “Maid to Order,” which grew out of her research for this book, was also published in Harper’s (April 2000), where it generated so many letters that the magazine had to create a special section to accommodate them. Both articles drew widespread media interest.
A consistently acclaimed author, Ehrenreich was hailed as “brilliant” by the New York Review of Books and “fascinating” by Newsweek in their reviews of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (Metropolitan, 1997). A collection of her essays The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (Random House, 1990) was described by The New York Times as “elegant, trenchant, savagely angry, morally outraged and outrageously funny.” Her other titles include: Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (Pantheon Books, 1989), which was nominated for a National Book Critics’ Award; The Snarling Citizen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995); The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1983); The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics (Vintage Books, 1971) with John Ehrenreich; For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Anchor Press, 1978), with Deirdre English; Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (Random House, 1986), with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs; The Mean Season: The Attack on Social Welfare (Pantheon Books, 1987), with Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward, and Fred Block; and a novel, Kipper’s Game (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993).
Ehrenreich has a PhD in Biology from The Rockefeller University and has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Ford Foundation Award for Humanistic Perspectives on Contemporary Society (1982), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987-88), and a grant for Research and Writing from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1995). She shared the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 1980 and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2003. She was a Regents’ Lecturer in Sociology at UCSB during the 1988-89 academic year.
Widely known as a public speaker and a frequent radio and television talk show guest, Ehrenreich has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia, and has appeared on such national programs as the Today Show, Nightline, Crossfire, Politically Incorrect, Charlie Rose, and All Things Considered.
The Columbia Journalism Review writes: “She’s a quintessential bookworm, a ferocious autodidact—someone who commands our respect and attention. In three decades of journalistic labor, she has enlarged our knowledge of women’s health, the middle class, the origins of war, the male psyche, corporate chicanery and political folly. American journalism has a way of absorbing and neutralizing its mavericks and nonconformists, but Ehrenreich remains the person she always was: ferocious feminist, irascible idealist, stubborn socialist.”
Barbara Ehrenreich is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the UCSB College of Creative Studies. The event is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, the Hull Chair in Women’s Studies, the Center for Work, Labor and Democracy, the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice, the UCSB College of Creative Studies, the Dean of Social Sciences, the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, Women’s Studies Program, UCSB Women’s Center, and the Citizenship and Democracy Focus Group of the IHC.
Courtesy of Borders, books by Barbara Ehrenreich will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
Tickets for the event are $10 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students, who must show valid ID when purchasing tickets and at the door. Tickets are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.