Early Life
Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander to Isabelle Oxley and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town". In an interview on C-SPAN, she characterized her parents as "strong union people" with two family rules: "never cross a picket line and never vote Republican". In a talk she gave in 1999, Ehrenreich called herself a "fourth-generation atheist".
"As a little girl", she told the New York Times in 1993, "I would go to school and have to decide if my parents were the evil people they were talking about, part of the Red Menace we read about in the Weekly Reader. Just because my mother was a liberal Democrat who would always talk about racial injustice." Her father was a copper miner who went to the Montana State School of Mines (now part of the University of Montana), and then to Carnegie Mellon University. He eventually became a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation. Her parents later divorced.
Ehrenreich studied chemistry at Reed College, graduating in 1963. Her senior thesis was entitled Electrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode. In 1968, she received a Ph.D in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University.
In 1970, Ehrenreich gave birth to her daughter Rosa in a public clinic in New York. "I was the only white patient at the clinic", she told the Globe and Mail newspaper in 1987. "They induced my labor because it was late in the evening and the doctor wanted to go home. I was enraged. The experience made me a feminist."
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