Barbara Ehrenreich - Career

Career

After completing her doctorate, Ehrenreich did not pursue a career in science. Instead, she worked first as an analyst, with the Bureau of the Budget in New York City and the Health Policy Advisory Center, and later as an assistant professor at the State University of New York. In 1972, Ehrenreich began co-teaching a course on women and health with feminist journalist and academic Deirdre English. Through the rest of the seventies, Ehrenreich worked mostly in health-related research, advocacy and activism, including co-writing, with English, several feminist books and pamphlets on the history and politics of women's health. During this period, she began speaking frequently at conferences staged by women's health centers and women's groups, universities, and the United States government. She also spoke regularly about socialist feminism and feminism in general.

Throughout her career, Ehrenreich has worked as a freelance writer, and she is best known for her non-fiction reportage, book reviews and social commentary. Her reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times Book Review supplement, Vogue, Salon.com, TV Guide, Mirabella and American Film. Her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Life, Mother Jones, Ms., The Nation, The New Republic, the New Statesman, In These Times, The Progressive, Working Woman, and Z magazine.

Ehrenreich has served as founder, advisor or board member to a number of organizations including the U.S. National Women's Health Network, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the National Mental Health Consumers' Self-Help Clearinghouse, the Nationwide Women's Program of the American Friends Service Committee, the Brooklyn-based Association for Union Democracy, political activist Robert Boehm's Boehm Foundation, the anti-poverty group Women's Committee of 100, the National Writers Union, The Progressive magazine's Progressive Media Project, the Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) advisory committee on women in the media, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the Center for Popular Economics, and the Campaign for America's Future.

Between 1979 and 1981, she served as an adjunct associate professor at New York University and as a visiting professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia and at Sangamon State University. She lectured at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was a writer-in-residence at Ohio State University, Wayne Morse chair at the University of Oregon, a teaching fellow at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the New York-based Society of American Historians.

In 2006, Ehrenreich founded United Professionals, an organization described as "a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization for white-collar workers, regardless of profession or employment status. We reach out to all unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed workers — people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control."

Ehrenreich is currently an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She also serves on the NORML Board of Directors, the Institute for Policy Studies Board of Trustees and the Editorial Board of The Nation. She has served on the editorial boards of Social Policy, Ms., Mother Jones, Seven Days, Lear's, The New Press, and Culturefront, and as a contributing editor to Harper's.