Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs.

Ehrenreich was born to Isabelle (née Oxley) and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town".

[2] In an interview on C-SPAN, she characterized her parents as "strong union people" with two family rules: "never cross a picket line and never vote Republican".

[4] Later in life, she wrote that she rejected "the God of monotheism" because of the philosophical problem of a being that was all good and all powerful, when people were living with "all the misery he allowed or instigated".

[7] After her father graduated from the Montana School of Mines, the family moved to Pittsburgh, New York, and Massachusetts, before settling down in Los Angeles.

"I was the only white patient at the clinic, and I found out this was the health care women got," she told The Globe and Mail newspaper in 1987, "They induced my labor because it was late in the evening and the doctor wanted to go home.

Through the rest of the seventies, Ehrenreich worked mostly in health-related research, advocacy and activism, including co-writing, with English, several feminist books and pamphlets on the history and politics of women's health.

[12] In 2000, Ehrenreich endorsed the presidential campaign of Ralph Nader; in 2004, she urged voters to support John Kerry in the swing states.

[17] 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.

We reach out to all unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed workers—people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control.

She has served on the editorial boards of Social Policy, Ms., Mother Jones, Seven Days, Lear's, The New Press, and Culturefront, and as a contributing editor to Harper's.

[12] In 1980, Ehrenreich shared the National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting with colleagues at Mother Jones magazine [23] for the cover story The Corporate Crime of the Century,[24] about "what happens after the U.S. government forces a dangerous drug, pesticide or other product off the domestic market, then the manufacturer sells that same product, frequently with the direct support of the State Department, throughout the rest of the world.

[26] In 2000, she received the Sidney Hillman Award for journalism for the Harper's article "Nickel and Dimed", which was later published as a chapter in her book of the same title.

"[28][29] In 2004, she received the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship,[30] awarded jointly by the Puffin Foundation of New Jersey and The Nation Institute to an American who challenges the status quo "through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance".

The piece inspired the 2011 documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc.[39] Ehrenreich lived in Alexandria, Virginia,[40] where she died at a hospice facility on September 1, 2022, from a stroke, six days after her 81st birthday.

[15] Her New York Times obituary called her an "Explorer of Prosperity's Dark Side" for her commentary of inequality in the United States.