Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 12, 1992 TAG: 9203110184
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ARLENE LEVINSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SYOSSET, N.Y. LENGTH: Long
That's Barbara EH-ren-rike: 50-year-old democratic socialist, author, Time magazine essayist, satirist, thinker, iconoclast and wit.
In the mental Rolodex of television producers, Barbara Ehrenreich is filed under Smart Women Who Can Talk. You may catch her on "Donahue," "Crier & Co.," "Crossfire," "Today" and "Nightline."
Puckish smile. Steady blue-eyed gaze. Something Montana-like in the honest blonde hair, open mind and bracing commentary.
Like, "War is morally on the same plane as human sacrifice."
Like, "We seem to have a lot of mood swings or obsessive fixations in this country. Missing children. Terrorism. Drugs. Saddam Hussein."
There's more where that comes from.
Welfare is a white-people's program. Tax time should be used to meditate on social inequities. She mocks the anti-abortion lobby: Sexually active women, she says, dare not dispose of used tampons for fear of flushing away fertilized eggs the body naturally expels.
From her suburban ranch house on Long Island, Ehrenreich picks up social change like radar. But it dawned on her only recently that she had become a Media Somebody - on a day when the fan mail, speaking invitations and unwanted solicitations covered her dining-room table. Clearing off places to feed her family supper, she threw out an $800 check. (It was later fished from the garbage, covered with damp coffee grounds.)
"That's when I said, `There's something wrong,' " she said, dryly.
This success is an uncommon achievement for someone whose livelihood is writing, chiefly free-lance opinion pieces and reporting, and books - nine titles so far. And it's a hectic life; a social critic does not live by the pen alone. She regularly speaks on college campuses and devotes spare time to the Democratic Socialists of America and to causes like protesting the Gulf War. Her home is an activist salon for her husband, Gary Stevenson, a labor organizer, who brings in a steady traffic of rank-and-file Americans.
"She's not just another lefty," said longtime friend, political scientist Frances Fox Piven of City University of New York. "She's much more insurgent and challenging than the school of left-wing ideas. She can be relied upon to be querulous and a little defiant."
And she can make improbable friends, like Lt. Col. Frank Hancock. He was leading 700 Army infantry troops on the front line in Saudi Arabia when an Ehrenreich essay in Time on the lockstep military riled him enough to write her. She wrote back, sending more articles, and a book. A correspondence began.
"I guarantee you, I don't think there are two subjects we agree on," said Hancock, 41, now stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky., who described himself as more inclined to the writings of William F. Buckley and Pat Buchanan.
But he was touched by her interest, her good wishes for him, and her humor, he said in an interview from his office. "She's funnier than hell," he said.
Other friends include Gloria Steinem and Ellen Goodman, two more members of that small club of women paid to think in public.
"She's fabulous," said Goodman, columnist for The Boston Globe. "Part of her skill is that she's funny, and she manages to skewer and hoist people by their own petards. And God knows, there are a lot of petards around."
Her work elicits the same admiration from peers on the right.
"I disagree with her," said Joseph Sobran. That out of the way, the critic-at-large for the conservative National Review magazine sounds like Ehrenreich's more like-minded fans.
"She's eloquent," Sobran said from his New York office. "She's very witty and readable. She knows her own mind. Her mind is alive." Hers is a mind, he said, "that is not just a Xerox machine."
For that, Ehrenreich credits her origins as a copper miner's daughter in Butte, Mont. Barbara Alexander learned early to respect the individual trying to hold his own against life, death and a corporate leviathan.
"One thing that influenced me was this rather defiant blue-collar culture," she said.
"I'll never forget," she said. "My mother used to watch TV when she ironed and the Army-McCarthy hearings were on. She used to slam the iron down."
Because she was smart in school, she chose a career in science, studying chemistry and physics at Reed College in Oregon, and cell biology at Rockefeller University in New York, where she earned a doctorate.
But in New York in the early 1960s the introvert went activist: She wrote to President Lyndon Johnson telling him war in Vietnam was a bad idea.
"I had never really thought hard about a public issue or about war. It runs counter to everything you were taught about not hitting," she said.
As a research scientist, she worked in New York City hospitals where she witnessed harsh disparities in treatment for the poor and the privileged.
"I would take long walks through Harlem. Little clicks were going off in my head. All these questions. I guess they just converged in my life."
She made her first big writing splash in the early 1970s, with "The American Health Empire," a book written with then-husband, John Ehrenreich, analyzing what ails U.S. health care, and "Witches, Midwives and Nurses," a pamphlet she wrote with Deirdre English about women's history as healers.
It that same decade, the Ehrenreichs divorced. By then she also had a daughter and a son, and writing became bread and butter.
Articles and essays for Ms and Mother Jones magazines led to more books to college lectures to more writing to radio to more writing to television to a book to Time magazine to more television . . .
In a society that encourages public speaking with grade school show-and-tell, it's still rare talent that gets someone on TV to talk about ideas.
Dan Morris, a producer for ABC's "Nightline," was among many who praised Ehrenreich's television skills. "She speaks crisply. She conveys her intelligence. She's fairly witty. She's fairly good on the repartee, the comeback," he said.
Ehrenreich can write and talk about plenty: economics, the vanishing middle class, foreign policy, the world order, race relations.
If she can't, she says so, and that's refreshing, said Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio, who discovered Ehrenreich 10 years ago through a mutual friend. While host of "All Things Considered," Stamberg put Ehrenreich on the air as a occasional news analyst.
"She'll tell you if she doesn't have anything to say," said Stamberg. "I appreciate that. A lot of people don't tell you, and they bull their way through."
For all the writing she's done, Ehrenreich lifted her public profile in 1990 with publication of "The Worst Years of Our Lives," her best-selling collection of essays on the 1980s.
The book also landed her a contract as a Time magazine essayist.
It's a sweet achievement for a former staff member of Seven Days, a glossy 1970s magazine the New Left offered as an alternative to Newsweek and Time.
Bigger things are in store for Ehrenreich. Her literary agent, Charlotte Sheedy, is making a video to get her more TV exposure - as a regular commentator say, or maybe with her own show. And she is grappling with her first novel, an intellectual thriller.
She's writing the novel in Key West - unusual for Ehrenreich. Most of her writings emanate from a basement office in her home. The windowless nest of paper, computer, printer, fax and files smells faintly of mildew. A picture of a beach and palm trees is tacked to the fake bleached-wood paneling.
"This is my life," she said, with a pleased smile.
by CNB