“It was an informal meeting. In front of salmon and vegetables, ”Natalie Schachar told The New York Times. “Barbara Ehrenreich was discussing with the editor of Harper’s Magazine which articles to write for the magazine. Then, as she herself recalled, they began to ramble. How can you make a living on the minimum wage? A stubborn reporter should try to find out. Its manager, Lewis Lapham, had half smiled and answered with one word: ‘You’ ”.
Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1 in Virginia, United States. She was 81 and was one of the brightest journalists of her generation. You have written dozens of investigations and reports published by the most important newspapers around the world and twenty-one books, the first of which, in 1969, on the anti-Vietnam war movement. But her most famous book was undoubtedly A starvation wage (Feltrinelli), released in 2001.
To write it, she got hired as a waitress, cleaner and saleswoman, all jobs paid on average $ 7 an hour, and for a year and a half she tried to live on that salary. She explained that it is impossible, if not doing at least two full-time jobs. To those who complimented her on her investigation of her, she replied: “Millions of people do this kind of work every day throughout their lives, haven’t you noticed them?”. Her journalistic activity had accompanied her feminist militancy and political commitment, and between the eighties and nineties she too had been a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America.
She was convinced that the job of a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world. Interviewed by the New Yorker, about the effort to change things she said: “The idea is not that in the course of our life we will make it and that this is the measure of who we are, but that we will die trying”. ◆