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August 30, 2002
Barbara
Ehrenreich to Give Reading
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This year's "common read" author,
Barbara Ehrenreich, will read from and discuss Nickel
and Dimed September 5 at 7:30 pm in Chapin Auditorium.
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In 1997, welfare reformers
announced the goal of moving 1 million people off welfare support
and into the workforce by the year 2000. President Bill Clinton
challenged American businesses to end the "culture of poverty"
surrounding welfare by finding and hiring "people who don't
think they can make it, who have no idea what a résumé
is, who never had to show up on time before." Social essayist
Barbara Ehrenreich was skeptical, not that welfare recipients
could show up for 8–5 workdays, but that they would be able
to survive on the $6- to $7-an-hour jobs available to "unskilled"
laborers. Ehrenreich decided to find out whether it was possible
to make ends meet on these wages.
Posing as a divorced
housewife returning to the workforce, Ehrenreich took jobs as
a waitress, a maid, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart clerk—often
two jobs at a time—in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota between
1998 and 2000. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
(Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 2001), her sobering and darkly
funny account of the "undercover" experience, was selected
for this year's MHC "common read" program and mailed
to all entering students this summer. It will be the focus of
discussions during fall orientation, enabling new students to
make connections with one another and with the intellectual life
of the campus.
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Nickel and Dimed
was also selected by librarians of the South Hadley Public Library
and the Gaylord Memorial Library, which have launched South Hadley
Reads, a program inspired by the national trend in citywide book
clubs that began in Seattle in 1998. "It's an exciting way
to bring the campus and the community together," said South
Hadley librarian Meg Clancy of the overlapping reading programs.
Several of the College's alumnae reading groups have chosen to
read the book as well.
Ehrenreich will read from and talk about Nickel and Dimed
on Monday, September 5, at 7:30 pm in Chapin Auditorium. "I
hope to get students interested in working on the living wage
campaign or starting one," said Ehrenreich, promising to
pick "the passages with the most laugh lines!" In addition,
there will be three townwide discussions of the book: on August
20 at 7 pm at the South Hadley Public Library, on September 9
at 7 pm at the Gaylord Memorial Library, and on September 15 at
3 pm at the Odyssey Bookshop at the Village Commons. Town residents
may enter a drawing to attend a dinner with Ehrenreich on September
5. The College has donated ten copies of Nickel and Dimed
to the town, and each library plans to purchase another 20 copies.
The Odyssey is offering a 25 percent discount on the book to residents
taking part in the community read.
"Barbara Ehrenreich's insightful and often funny writing
provides us with a wonderful foundation to begin to discuss an
important topic," said Acting Dean of the College Rochelle
Calhoun. "The selection of Ehrenreich's book for the first-year
common reading encourages our new students to think critically
about social issues and to expand their understanding of what
a diverse community really is."
About Nickel and Dimed
When Barbara Ehrenreich
gave up her multiroom home and sit-down writing job to become
an unskilled laborer, she vowed not to fall back on her education,
to take the highest-paying job offered to her, and to accept the
cheapest available lodging. In other words, she would do her best
to make ends meet, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.
She had many things in her favor: a car, no dependents, white
skin, English literacy, good health, motivation, and down payments
for housing. Still, Ehrenreich struggled. Even counting pennies
and living in trailer parks and dingy motels, she found she couldn't
cover her most basic expenses.
"I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium,
that ‘hard work' was the secret of success," writes
Ehrenreich. "'Work hard and you'll get ahead' or ‘It's
hard work that got us where we are.' No one ever said that you
could work hard—harder than you ever thought possible—and
still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt."
For those millions of Americans labeled the "working poor,"
she asks, "If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days
a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set
in?"
About Barbara Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich is the
author of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions
of War, The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes From a
Decade of Greed, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle
Class, and eight other books. A frequent contributor to Time,
Harper's, Magazine, The New Republic, The Nation, and the New
York Times Magazine, she lives near Key West, Florida.
Ehrenreich shared
the National magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 1980,
was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1987–88, and has
received honorary degrees from Reed College and the State University
of New York at Old Westbury. She is a frequent radio and TV talk-show
guest and a noted public speaker. In March 2001, she spoke at
Mount Holyoke's symposium Frances Perkins and Her Legacies:
Labor, Women, and the Unfinished Business of the New Deal,
at which scholars examined Frances Perkins's legacy in the context
of the contemporary political climate. In the talk "Women
in the Low-Wage Ghetto," she detailed the experience later
documented in Nickel and Dimed and said, "Welfare
reform is the most pressing women's issue we have before us today.
In its design there was a catch that no one thought of: it costs
money to hold a job."
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