“COMMON READ” TO INSPIRE DISCUSSIONS AMONG
MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE STUDENTS, TOWN RESIDENTS

Libraries, College join in choosing Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed,
an acclaimed look at the life of the working poor

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. ­ First-year students at Mount Holyoke College will be joined by residents of the town of South Hadley this year as they read and discuss Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich’s firsthand account of life in low-wage America.

Since 2000, Mount Holyoke’s new students have taken part in a “common read” as part of the College’s orientation program, receiving copies of the selected book during the summer and participating in discussions after their arrival on campus. “The common read enables new students to discover connections with other students and to the intellectual life of the campus,” said Rochelle Calhoun, the acting dean of the College.

“Barbara Ehrenreich's insightful and often funny writing provides us with a wonderful foundation to begin to discuss an important topic,” Calhoun said. “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."

This year, the librarians of the South Hadley Public Library and the Gaylord Memorial Library are launching South Hadley Reads, inspired by the national trend in citywide book clubs that began in Seattle in 1998. The librarians, Criss Quigley and Meg Clancy, agreed that Nickel and Dimed (Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 2001) would be an appropriate book for a townwide readership as well.

With their overlapping reading programs, Mount Holyoke and South Hadley become part of a new trend: the sharing of a single book across both campus and surrounding community. “It’s an exciting way to bring the campus and the community together,” Clancy said. Several of the College’s alumnae clubs have chosen to read the book as well.

Ehrenreich will speak about the book on September 5 at 7:30 PM in Chapin Auditorium at Mount Holyoke. 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 10 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.

About Nickel and Dimed

In early 1998 Barbara Ehrenreich, one of America’s sharpest and most original social critics, posed the following questions to an editor at Harper’s Magazine: How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? And how, in particular, were the 12 million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?

To answer her own questions, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted the highest-paying jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels, discovering quickly that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations take an enormous mental and physical toll, and that one job is not enough — not, that is, if you intend to live indoors. “With all the real life assets I’ve built up in middle age — bank account, IRA, health insurance, multiroom home — waiting indulgently in the background, there was no way I was going to ‘experience poverty’ or find out how it ‘really feels’ to be a long-term low-wage worker,” Ehrenreich cautions. “My aim here was much more straightforward and objective — just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.” What she discovered was that, in fact, she could not.

About Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich is the author or co-author of twelve books, including Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, The Snarling Citizen, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, and the essay collection The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes From a Decade of Greed. She has written articles, reviews, and essays for dozens of magazines, including Ms., Harper’s, The Nation, The Progressive, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Magazine.

Ehrenreich shared the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 1980, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1987-1988, 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 the legacy of Perkins, a 1902 graduate of Mount Holyoke who became the nation’s first woman cabinet member.