Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘Myth Busting’ Writer And Activist, Dies
Matthew Underwood
Updated on February 06, 2026
Barbara Ehrenreich, the maker, protester and self-portrayed “dream buster” who in such remarkable capabilities as “Irritated” and “Hustle” tried conventional considering class, religion and the overall idea of an American dream, has kicked the container at age 81.
Ehrenreich kicked the container Thursday morning in Alexandria, Virginia, according to her kid, the maker and author Ben Ehrenreich. She had actually encountered a stroke.
“She was, she explained, good to go,” Ben Ehrenreich tweeted Friday. “She was never much for thoughts and petitions, but you can regard her memory by loving one another, and by engaging like condemnation.”
She was considered Barbara Alexander in Butte, Montana, and raised in a group of affiliation partners, where family rules included “never cross a picket line and never vote Republican.” She focused on material science as an undergrad at Reed College, and got a PhD in immunology at Rockefeller University. Starting during the 1970s, she worked as a teacher and researchers and ended up being continuously powerful in the ladies’ dissident turn of events, from forming presents to appearing at gatherings around the country. She similarly co-formed a book on student activism, “Long March, Short Spring,” with her then-mate, John Ehrenreich.
A useful essayist who regularly turned out books and paper and magazine articles, Ehrenreich honed an open organization style that brought her a wide readership for regardless upsetting and unsentimental considerations. She despised freedom, composed religion, unregulated monetary issues and what Norman Vincent Peale comprehensively called “the power of positive thinking.”
EHRP founder, Barbara Ehrenreich—visionary critic, journalist & author—has died. We are devastated by her loss but hope to continue her values, supporting writers following in her tradition of examining the struggles of the working poor, particularly women, with intensity & flair
— Economic Hardship Reporting Project (@econhardship) September 2, 2022
A protector of liberal makes from affiliations embryo evacuation opportunities, Ehrenreich regularly drew upon her own experiences to grant her contemplations. The presentation of her young lady Rosa helped pushed her with transforming into a ladies’ extremist, she later got a handle on, considering the way that she was stunned at the crisis center’s treatment of patients. Her battle with chest sickness quite a while ago propelled her 2009 book “Splendid Sided,” in which she evaluated the exhausting colloquialisms and affirmations of well wishers and inspected the American interest — a religion, she called it — on honest intentions, with the outcome of dismissing the country’s many burdens.
“We need to set ourselves up for a fight against terrifying obstacles, both by our own doing and constrained by the normal world. Likewise, the underlying step is to recover from the mass extravagant that is positive thinking,” she formed.