A cultural analyst and political activist, Barbara Ehrenreich is arguably one of the most astute, acerbic and witty critics in the United States. She belongs to the generation of feminists who came to maturity in the 1960s as student dissidents, and her views were forged in resistance to the Vietnam War. Committed to grassroots feminism and union organizing, she has also been critical of two forms of Marxism. As she explains in "The Professional-Managerial Class," (Between Labor and Capital, 1977), she opposes both orthodox Marxist- Leninism, which invokes an economic analysis of class and puts the working class in the vanguard of revolutionary action; and the "academicization of Marxism," which effectively distances Marxist analysis from reality--a reality that, for Ehrenreich, includes the ideological constructions of gender and race as much as class.

Ehrenreich was born 26 August 1941 in Butte, Montana, to Ben Howes Alexander, a copper miner, and his wife...