Book Review: Barbara Ehrenreich's "This Land Is Their Land"
by SusanG
Sun Jul 27, 2008 at 10:05:31 AM PDT
This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books, New York: 2008
256 pages, $24.00
In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s, the ground was shifting under our feet, recarving the American landscape. The peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.
Barbara Ehrenreich has spent her career writing about the niches of that narrow ledge where the shrinking middle class clings, and in the past few years, the accelerated narrowing of that ledge--and the terror it's creating in the American population--has become something of her own specialized beat. As the acclaimed author of Nickle and Dimed, an account of her attempt to live on minimum wage in different parts of America, she has earned her stripes in talking about working class and populist issues.
In this latest collection of essays, she once again travels the hard-times road, with special attention to health care and civil liberties issues, giving voice to a befuddlement at how we seem to keep finding ourselves in worsening conditions each time she takes to the writing task. She casts her knowledgeable eye on a wider landscape than usual, pulling in observations on foreign policy and America's place in the world, the acquiescence of its hard-pressed population in economic hardship, the loss of privacy and all the other issues of concern to observant progressives.
But two areas of importance clearly stand out for her in this collection. One is women's issues, and the second is the role the religious right has played in pushing this country into the mean, low place where we find ourselves now. One of the most astute essays focuses on the gradual erosion of the public sphere and its accompanying loss of the collective sense of responsibility for the least among us; she points out that the transfer of public funds to private religious institutions nearly guarantees in the long run the ineffectiveness of government intervention in the poverty cycle, thus conveniently reinforcing a favorite conservative claim:
Of course, Bush's faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services, not only do they attack candidates who favor expanded public services, but they stand to gain public money by doing so .... The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state.
Ehrenreich's gift for humor and acerbic hyperbole is on display throughout as well, skewering the hypocrisy of the right--particularly adherents of the religious right--on their lack of logic. For example, she takes on the challenge of following the twisted reasoning on the dangers of homosexual marriage and winds up in a place where we can all be pretty certain the fundamentalists almost certainly do not want to be:
The logic is clear. Since the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas (in 2003) that antisodomy laws are unconstitutional, it's been legal for gays to have sex. Add to that a ban on gay marriage and you will create a special class of people--gays and lesbians--who are free to have all the sex they want, as long as it's outside of marriage.
This is bound to lead to grumbling among the heterosexual population, even a certain amount of gay envy. Heterosexuals will start saying: "How come we're supposed to get married if we want to have sex? How come homosexuals get all the breaks?"
By far the most complex and thoughtful essay in the book, however, is reserved for one of the areas to which Ehrenreich has paid particularly deep attention over her writing career: feminism. She has built up a reputation and quality of work in women's issues that few public intellectuals can rival, and as such, she's been able to follow closely most of the inside-out twists and turns that the expanded definitions of choice and equality have implied. Some of the most contentious areas in women's issues have focused on whether women's influence in the public realm will bring about more connection, more diplomacy, more reliance on reason and less on violence and militarism. The hope in many feminist circles has long been that inclusion of more women in the public sphere would balance out some of the disturbing qualities long associated with the masculine. This hope, at least for Ehrenriech, was clearly dashed with the emergence of Abu Ghraib torture and photos, and the role played by some of the female soldiers there. And the sometimes automatic assumption of overlap between all human rights and women's rights come in for some honest and painful examination in this book:
In fact, we have to realize, in all humility, that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of female moral superiority is not only naive; it also is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism. Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman--a promotion, a college degree, the right to serve alongside men in the military--is by its very nature a victory for all of humanity. And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle--the struggle for gender equality--when in face we have many more.
The struggles for peace and social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality.
Ehrenreich's staunch dedication to progressive causes and their examination--and often their brutal re-examination--places her in a class with very few peers in the liberal movement. Her willingness to think out loud, to explore, to continue to push to find new implications in current events has never been displayed to better advantage than it is in This Land Is Their Land, and with decades of wisdom and writing experience behind her, she still manages to surprise and delight with each new book. Her latest collection is a keeper, and is highly recommended.
