Barbara Ehrenreich Rhetorical Analysis

America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. This phrase is sung with pride and passion by American citizens. However, some of America’s hardest working citizens are shackled down by a factor that they have no control over. Poverty, is what’s keeping citizens imprisoned while they should be living free. An appalling 44 percent of homeless Americans are employed (http://nationalhomeless.org/). Why should people who go to work and hold a job be subjected to homelessness in the greatest country in the world? Many other middle-class Americans are too shielded by their almost perfect lives to even see this. Many of them even have the audacity to say that homeless individuals or the lower-class is just lazy. Barbara Ehrenreich directly

Reality checks are very powerful when trying to make strong points. Since the target audience is middle-class citizens, satire is used to get a reaction out of those individuals. Through phrases involving verbal irony through a sarcastic tone, Barbara is able to discuss a controversial topic while addressing a particular group. Barbara is complaining about how hard “scrubbing in Maine” has been and how much of a toll it has taken on her, “God knows. People on the street aren’t going to hail us as heroines of proletarian labor” (Ehrenreich 117). “People on the streets” is a her directly addressing the people that employ her and her co-workers to clean their houses. In other words, the “people on the streets” are the middle-class citizens. Readers at this point in the memoir are realizing how they also have an impact on all of the low-wage workers even if they aren’t a part of that group. The message Ehrenreich world to send out is that the lifestyle of low-wage workers is a vicious cycle that is rarely broken. The growing population of these individuals are subject to many prejudices such as being “lazy”, which Barbara tries to disprove. Verbal irony through a sarcastic tone strengthens the central claim since many people respond well to being addressed in a more satirical, direct manner. Barbara continues discussing the Maids, “no one is going to say, after I vacuum ten rooms and still have time to scrub the kitchen floor, “Goddamn, Barb, you’re so good!”” (Ehrenreich 117). The fact that the middle-class doesn’t even understand the amount of hard work that is done addresses the subclaim of how hard life is while working minimum wage, or close to it, jobs, while still using a sarcastic tone. The audience of middle-class Americans will most likely put down this memoir feeling a call to action to change the operation of the treatment of these trapped