Barbara Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, in 1941. Butte at the time was a thriving town, and Ehrenreich’s father and much of her family worked in the mines and on the railroads. After her father received a degree at the Butte School of Mines, Ehrenreich moved frequently with her family—from Butte to Pittsburgh to New York to Massachusetts to Los Angeles—and found herself eventually ensconced in the middle class. She attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she majored in chemistry at first and then switched to physics. She enrolled as a grad student at Rockefeller University studying theoretical physics, then changed her field to cellular biology and earned a Ph.D.
As the...
