Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Discovery, Years, America

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1989). “FEAR OF FALLING”, Pantheon

• No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Mother, Children, America

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

• Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  War, Years, Class

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1989). “FEAR OF FALLING”, Pantheon

• in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Taken, Class, White

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1989). “FEAR OF FALLING”, Pantheon

• By the Reagan era, the 'culture of poverty' had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to 'defer gratification' or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Jobs, Attitude, Addiction

  "Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, American Poverty, 50 Years Later". www.tomdispatch.com. March 15, 2012.

• war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions ... It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  War, Political, Soul

• Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding--and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Children, Philosophy, Mean

• But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Fire, Culture, Shapes

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