Barbara Ehrenreich - Personal Life and Family

Personal Life and Family

Ehrenreich has one brother, Benjamin Jr., and one sister, Diane.

When Ehrenreich was 35, according to the book Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents, her mother died "from a likely suicide". Her father died years later from Alzheimer's disease.

She has been married and divorced twice. She met her first husband, John Ehrenreich, during an anti-war activism campaign in New York City, and they married in 1966. He is a clinical psychologist, and they co-wrote several books about health policy and labor issues before divorcing in 1977. In 1983 she married Gary Stevenson, a union organizer for the Teamsters. She divorced Stevenson in 1993.

Ehrenreich has two children. Born in 1970, her daughter Rosa was named after Rosa Parks, Rosa Luxemburg, and a great-grandmother; She is a Virginia-based columnist. Born in 1972, her son Benjamin is a journalist and novelist in Los Angeles.

Filling in for a vacationing Thomas Friedman as a columnist with the New York Times in 2004, Ehrenreich wrote about how, in the fight for women's reproductive rights, "it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me", and said that she herself "had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years". In her 1990 book of essays The Worst Years of Our Lives, she wrote that "the one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks".

Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after the release of her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. This resulted in the award-winning article "Welcome to Cancerland", published in the November 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine. The article would go on to inspire the 2011 documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc..

In 2000 Ehrenreich endorsed the Presidential campaign of Ralph Nader; in 2004, she urged voters to support John Kerry in the swing states. In February 2008, Ehrenreich expressed support for Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign,

Ehrenreich lives in Florida.