Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet.
They carried pictures, love letters, malaria tablets, Bibles, dope, a rabbit's foot, and each other. And, if they made it home alive, they carried unrelenting images of a controversial war that history is only now beginning to absorb.
