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Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

“I don't know when the cult of conspicuous busyness began, but it has swept up almost all the upwardly mobile, professional women I know. Already, it is getting hard to recall the days when, for example, 'Let's have lunch' meant something other than 'I've got more important things to do than talk to you right now.”

Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

Book:WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

Work

WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

This novel delves into the personal struggles and societal challenges faced by its characters during a time of great upheaval and change. more

Author

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is an American political figure born on August 26, 1941. She is known for her activities in labor movements, social justice, and gender equality. more

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“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.”

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“When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where ... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.”

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“It's even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stop mowing the lawn right now, it will probably be a long, long time before the yard gets overrun by lions and snakes.”

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“Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.”

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“Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death.”

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“In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s ... [t]he peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.”

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Book:Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation

Source: Going to Extremes: Notes from a Divided Nation

“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.”

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Book:FEAR OF FALLING

Source: FEAR OF FALLING

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“Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.”

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Book:FEAR OF FALLING

Source: FEAR OF FALLING